Educating All Students to be Conceptual Thinkers

"Studies have shown that many of our high schools, even those that boast of high graduation and college-attendance rates, rarely demand that students use information, skills, and technologies to construct new knowledge and to solve complex problems, integrate concepts and ideas across disciplines, communicate effectively orally and in writing, and work in diverse groups. Yet this is precisely the kind of learning students need for a Conceptual Age. Students themselves tell us that they want to be held to high standards but that they find their high schools boring, unchallenging, and disconnected from their lives. Closing the achievement gap between white and minority students -- and making sure all students are prepared to function successfully in a changing world -- will require a dispassionate examination of a high school system that all too often is failing students on two levels. Two serious gaps hold back most of our students and risk the prosperous future of the entire country. The gap we hear least about is the one between a rigorous, intellectually challenging curriculum and the rote instructional program that is commonplace in far too many classrooms. The gap we hear much more about is the one in student achievement that is exposed when data is disaggregated by race, ethnicity, and family income. Are we supplying the conditions in our schools to create a new crop of original thinkers? Are we making sure our curricula and instructional programs are not relegated to repetitive practice, gathering and organizing information, remediation, and test prep? Are we requiring all students to use their minds well to construct knowledge, to inquire, to invent, to make meaning and relevance out of their learning? Hardly, writes Gerry House in the most recent issue of America School Board Journal."