A Frustrating Day

What does democracy in the classroom look like? If you look at today, a lot of talking and not a lot of work. Frustrating for all.

The iPod work is in limbo right now (students have been assigned to interview the teachers not yet interviewed. There is not much that can be done until the interviews have been completed).

So, today involved us asking students what they thought should happen next. With the morning group, that involved trying to figure out the next steps. Generally, the class agreed that studying democracy in schools was the direction to head, so we read from two articles about democracy in schools for the purpose of describing what our classroom should look like based on information from the article.

But, after reading the article, it was clear that there was a problem: the statement "we should have a democratic classroom" is an answer to a question. That question is "how should a classroom function to work effectively?" The real problem comes when asking the follow-up question, "work effectively to do what?" What are we trying to do? We asked the students what they wanted out of the class mostly, we got a lot of blank stares. Time was running out for the morning group, so we assigned and two-page essay in which they answered the question: "what do you want out of the class."

For the afternoon, since we already knew there were some problems, we started with the question and the essay. A discussion followed. Sort of. Eventually, the class was able to name some pretty important things they want out of the class: They want to feel confidant, accomplish something, learn to work hard -- mostly it was a common sense list of the traits of highly successful people. Additionally, they identified the type of things the class could do that wold help them accomplish those goals. One of the suggestions was to make sure we work on difficult, worthy projects.

The ultimate question is whether a classroom needs to be democratic to accomplish the things we want. I don't know the answer to that question. Maybe that's the next challenge.