On Common Ground

1. On Common Ground Chapter Six “Turning Book Burners Into Lifelong Learners” Gena Woodard

2. “We are burning our notes and books. We are outta here!!”

3. Schools and Universities alike are sending students a chilling message: “Learn or we will punish you.”

4. “The most important attitude that can be formed is that of the desire to learn.”—Littky,2004 W.B. Yeats said it this way: “Education is not the filling of pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

5. As a PLC it is our responsibility to change this practice and create life long learners.

6. Lifelong Learning: • A love for learning for its own sake • Voluntary engagement in activities • Asking one’s own questions and taking responsibility for addressing and finding answers • Ability to marshal resources: books, technology, time, money, people, and tools • Sustain engagement over time • Continious reflection on oneself as a leaner and learning • Capacity to set one’s own high standards of learning and determine if one is succeeding at resolving question posed • The capacity to know and celebrate success

7. The Principal and Lifelong Learning

8. Build a staff of lifelong learners Model lifelong learning • Must hold high expectations for the learning of every educator in school • Require evidence of learning Ghandi said, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” Place lifelong learning in sight • Make educators learning visible Enlist parental participation

9. Students as Lifelong Learners • Learning has to become a common goal in the learning community. Every student will then show increasing evidence over time of becoming an independent, self sustained learner. • Schools must have systematic means of assessing the progress of each student

10. What will educators do when they learn that students perform well under our direction while at school and then “burn their books” when they are on their own?

11. Promoting Lifelong Learners • Give learning a good name • Pose and answer our own problems • Reduce didactic instruction • Promote pleasure and success • Reward instead of punish

12. Lifelong Learning as the “Standard”

13. We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.  ~Lloyd Alexander You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.  ~Clay P. Bedford The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.  ~John Lubbock