What if in Education

A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.

What If Questions in Education

Main Page: Implications of a Learners’ View (ALV) for Practice, Research, and Policies

Theme: What exists in schools results from educators making counterfactual choices.

 

THE QUESTION, WHAT IF…? IN EDUCATION introduces a series of speculations from a learners’ view (ALV) about implications of choices in teaching and learning. They are a way to extrapolate (extend objectively and systematically) what is known into the future without putting teachers or students at further risks of failure earned by real life trial-and-errors. For example, What if teachers used ALV routinely to instruct lessons and all students learned all of those lessons? What if teachers accomplished these outcomes in six current academic years? What if these accomplishments included all known principles scientists have described of the human experience? Who would assemble these principles? Who would instruct them to young learners? What would happen to the socio-economic structure of society? What impact would this have on life chances of people? What questions are hidden from view that lessons would miss? Why are they hidden and why would someone not reveal them?

These speculations celebrate the range of human options available every second of every day for educators to consider beyond common practice, research, and policies. In their own way, what if questions offer a case statement for educators to use ALV.

In this sense, speculations are a tool to make extensions of the data that ALV represents come alive. They can lead us to question long held assumptions about teaching and learning. They can clarify the stakes as well as consequences of educators choosing or not choosing to use ALV. These extensions can describe plausible outcomes of using ALV routinely in lessons. These outcomes indicate that results of lessons, instruction, and schooling occur through small, individually innocuous, daily choices educators make, not by some inevitable outside force.

What if Questions in Education

  1. What if all teachers used a Learner’ View (ALV)?
  2. What if all learners learned all lessons of teachers?
  3. What if all learners meet or exceeded the minimum academic performance scores on state tests?

References

  1. A Learners’ View (ALV) in One Lesson
  2. Cowley, R. (2001). Introduction. In R. Crowley, (Ed.). What If? Eminent Historians Imagining What Might Have Been. NYC: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, pp. xiii-xvi.
  3. What if … Approach to a Case Statement

Related Reading

  1. New Era School Initiative (NESI) Press Release
  2. New Era School Initiative (NESI) Interviews and Conversations about Applying ALV (a Learners’ View)

Last Edited: February 14, 2015