校长说 I 为什么兴趣驱动的教育很重要 Why Interest-Driven Education Matters

为什么以孩子兴趣为根基的教育至关重要？

兴趣驱动与外部管控式教育的对比

这一理念也引出两个核心教育问题：

• 在教师基于孩子 “应知必会” 的知识引导，与基于孩子 “好奇想学” 的兴趣驱动教育之间，如何找到最佳平衡点？

• 我们究竟如何定义 “经验”？部分经历看似微不足道，我们又该如何以愉悦且高效的方式，从中实现有价值的学习？

该图显示：一百万等于100个一万，或者说100 × 100 × 100

Many schools – and certainly not only schools in China – are so worried about eventual examination results such as at gaokao, A level or IB Diploma that they over-teach and take far too much of the responsibility for each student’s learning on themselves. This leaves students with a cliff to climb when they finish school because they have not learned how to take responsibility for their own learning. This is an unhealthy and ultimately dangerous pattern of growth that does not serve students well in the longer term. 

Instead, there are other models that are variously depicted in the following diagram. (The teachers felt that it would have been helpful to have a scale showing how high the cliff is, but we are treating it as the level required for entry to university.) 

Assuming the cliff is the level required to enter university, each of the four patterns shows different ways to approach that transition: 

• A is the pattern in the previous picture where schools take all the responsibility on themselves;

• B represents a steady growth gradually increasing in speed toward the end;

• C shows gentle early years growth followed by rapid change around grades 7-10 and a more gradual approach to the final years of school;

• D puts all the emphasis on early years. 

Teachers were invited to discuss the merits of the four systems, bearing in mind that every child will develop differently and that some will prefer different patterns. The general consensus was that B left everything too late, but not as badly as A; D puts too much pressure on young children; so C is optimal: allow children to mature early without too much pressure, cater for rapid change during junior high school (middle school) and so be ready for responsible, self-disciplined mature study by the time the last two or three years of school are reached. 

In practice schools will adopt mixtures of these profiles for different children in different subjects, and it is a vital part of our mentoring system that teachers monitor and provide suitable approaches for each student. 

The key words are "managed", "graduated", "transferred" and "responsibility" for learning. Our interest-driven curriculum model means that we can start this process as soon as children begin school, gradually transferring responsibility for their learning to them so that by the time they are ready to leave school – and wherever they go for their further study – they become self-motivated, self-controlled and self-disciplined students who can manage their own education. 

This positive reinforcement cycle based on what children are interested in is our model for interest-driven, child-centred, inquiry-based, mentored transdisciplinary learning. 

Now, because they are never given the space and opportunity to discover their own interests, children feel forced to learn, which breaks the principle that willing learning is always better than reluctant learning. And there is a real danger, as they grow older and more insistent on being heard, that children will disengage from learning just at the age – around 11-14 years – when their most formative growth should take place. 

A key component of interest-driven learning is that we place more emphasis on enjoying learning for its own sake than on learning conceived as a sacrifice we make today for the sake of tomorrow, and especially some "tomorrow" dictated by someone else. This tendency of educators to try to justify uninteresting, tedious learning on the grounds that it is "necessary for what comes later" is a disaster for student motivation and engagement. 

This summary of a point John Dewey makes in his 1938 book Experience and Education really points us in the direction of how to reinforce the positives of learning based upon interest. 

Let’s deal with these in turn. 

We can’t expect every child to rediscover for themselves everything that has ever been discovered by the human race: that would mean that we in effect were expecting them to begin all over again, which would be absurd. 

So, there is enormous value in teachers providing resources in terms of knowledge, skills and best learning-practices that mean that children don’t have to begin all over again and can "start where their elders left off". But that doesn’t mean that the resources are forced on children. On the contrary, they’re provided at the right speed and in the right way to take account of the particular learning-styles, interests and needs of each child. That’s the power of a mentored approach: it personalises learning, and enables children to acquire necessary knowledge in optimal ways in terms of speed, sequence, style and direction.

The key here is another central educational word much used by the IB: reflection. Reflection involves thinking about every experience, putting it in context, and understanding that even if it is at first relatively fleeting and even thin – we may just put a child on a horse for a few minutes, and that is all there is to it, waiting to see if they are attracted to and interested in equestrianism – we can build a mini program of inquiry around that experience. 

That’s the point of our mentored transdisciplinary learning diagram that we can fill in in response to any experience or interest whatsoever. We’ve already been using one in our summer camps based on the idea of a child being "interested in horses". 

What we’ve done is to consider some of the many ways in which our interest in horses can be expanded, and as a result our experience enriched. These include thinking about horses in sport, in art, in history, in questions about where they come from, about their biology, how long they live, the contribution they have made to human history and development, and all sorts of other questions including the rich vocabulary associated with horses in English and Chinese. 

Once we’ve understood this idea, we can apply it to any experience. For example, the summer camp visited a motor museum and did many other things.

Members of the training-group were invited to look at a blank version of the curriculum diagram and choose their own subject of interest from which they could draw up their own mini unit of inquiry. 

We turn mere experiences into rich, educational experiences by using them to reflect on the wider aspects of the topic of interest that lies at their centre. And we ensure that all these interest-driven inquiries cover the required content of the Chinese National Curriculum by using curriculum mapping from the subjects studied and the knowledge acquired to the demands in the Standards. 

As an example, John shared something he often used to do to try to give people a more intuitive idea of how big one million is by using the diagrams as shown. We can use the notion that dinosaurs lived "millions of years ago" to ask all kinds of questions, including "How big is a million?", which is one of the content-specific topics in the primary mathematics curriculum. 

The diagram shows how one million is 100 lots of 10,000, or 100 x 100 x 100 

We agreed that we will return to these and many other topics in future sessions.