College Should NOT be an Internship for Professors!
I understand the reasoning associated with ‘School is a 16-Year Internship for Professors’ and associated with ‘K-12 is a 13-Year Internship for Teachers’ — as suggested in one of the comments. But this is associated with the educator-controlled, industrial model, lecture / homework / exams pedagogy still widely used at all levels of formal education today. There is some justification for suggesting internships (and nothing else) with practicing career individuals would be an improvement. Indeed, I would suggest internships with a TEAM of practicing individuals would be even better!
However, this approach is unlikely to be the optimum career preparation — for at least two reasons: (1) There is a huge difference between the training most likely to result from ‘non-academic’ internships and the Effective Learning that I believe is critical (see a recent blog post of mine: https://johncbennettjr.com/2016/02/07/21st-century-student-effective-learning/ ). For sure, the intern get facilitated in the broader areas found in the photo above and in the blog post. Indeed, the intern could herself / himself accomplish the Effective Learning. But, as I noted, I don’t believe this is likely. And (2) I do not believe it is likely that the internship would include the challenge of innovation and creativity that I believe to be so important to successful careers. Of course, this COULD be included in the internship; I simply don’t believe it would be very often. From my involvement with university ‘senior design project’ student efforts, increasingly (and sadly) they are not the student-controlled team creativity efforts portrayed but rather sponsor-controlled ‘to-do’ efforts. Most actual internships I believe would be the same!
So would would I suggest would be the ‘optimum career preparation’ today? Glad you asked… My choice would follow a “HOME-SCHOOLED EFFECTIVE LEARNING MODEL.” I use ‘home-schooled’ NOT in the literal sense but to suggest it to avoid rigid scheduling and to be flexible in format while still aligned with appropriate standards; educators would provide driving questions that are student-addressed. Effective Learning emphasizes the items listed in the photo above (though, as I question in the blog post really doesn’t need the ‘21st Century’ designation), items such as deep learning, interdisciplinary, creative, communicative, cooperative, … Were I leading the planning efforts, I’d advocate for no use of textbooks and no grades — both of which I believe have negative impact on learning.
Educators responsibilities would include ‘short’ lectures to groups of students requesting input, to students introducing core knowledge, to students observed by educators to be misinterpreting information. They would also offer regular feedback on student presentation and documentation of suggested progress. They would be responsible for the driving questions. And, of course, they’d be solely responsible for assigning course grades. Student-controlled learning that’s educator-facilitated!!!
Can this be accomplished within the current school architecture. Of course it can. What’s really critical is not the room layout but the educator buy-in for this very different approach, most especially relinquishing control. But if I were asked to propose the ideal architecture for a new school, it would include a series of circular ‘pods’ with a huge central open space surrounded by small rooms around the outside. The central space would have flexible, movable furniture; lots of power outlets; high internet wifi capacity; projection screens, … The outside rooms would have educator offices, small conference rooms, seminar rooms, shop spaces, storage rooms, …
What do you think — if you’ve gotten this far???
