My repsonse to "If Students Designed their own Schools"

                       I found it hard to even imagine a school where students had so much control over their own curriculum. That they could critique each others work and then pick out projects that suited their own interests on a weekly basis. Not only that but the teacher weren't really teachers, they still helped the students is they asked for it but they functioned more as coaches. Although the idea was very intriguing and it seemed to work for those students I'm not sure that I'd want to attend a school like that. The "If students designed their own school" philosophy in my opinion would work better for the older grades, around 9-12. This is because in those older grades the students would have their minds more set around what they want to do for a living and they'd be able to create their curriculum and projects around a topic or idea that would better help them for the future. In younger grades with the freedom of choosing what to learn and peers having to critique each others work typically they'd slack off and not learn as much if anything because its very hard to get students out of their comfort zone with no push from teachers if they never have gotten any before. Thats because there would be a different type of structure, one not as strong as most students get now from teachers but perhaps it would be even better from the peer pressure of doing well.

If I was to choose what school to attend, if a regular model or this “Student Designed” one I’d pick the regular model only because I wouldn’t feel that I was learning as much if I was to choose all the areas to research and if I had to create the ideas for all my projects and a rubric for how they must be done. When learning or working on a project and the material that needs to completed is already written out for me I prefer it because then I can expand into what mandatory while adding on some of my preferences. I do enjoy creating my own projects but only once in awhile so theres some mixture of tactics in my learning.

Always having to choose the areas of research would be too stressful for me since I’d always feel to be missing something or not to be learning enough. Its nice to switch it up for a change every once in awhile but having to plan out your own system of learning all the time would get tiring and if you had gotten tired from choosing complicated processes for learning each time chances are you’ll slack off later on.