Education By Design

Last week a friend asked me how discipline is handled in an EBD classroom, and I’ve been trying to come up with an answer.

EBD stands for Education By Design. An EBD classroom is one in which the teacher tries not to be the center of attention. The chief learning method is the group experiential challenge, in which students collaborate on a task that demonstrates their learning. For example, in the joint honors freshman English class Lisa Cochran and I co-teach, we recently decided to take an EBD approach to teaching 35 literary terms required by the ninth-grade language curriculum.

Instead of handing the class a list of the terms and their definitions to memorize, we asked them to come up with their own definitions. After they did, we broke them into seven small groups, each of which collaborated on writing definitions of five of the terms. Then we held a big meeting. Each group proposed its definitions, and the class voted whether to accept them.

It took several class blocks to agree on the wording, and some of the kids complained that it was a waste of time. But more of them said they’d never had to think so hard about what a word or phrase really means. ‘I’ve forgotten most of the vocabulary words I ever memorized,’ one boy said, ‘but I won’t forget these.’

Back to the discipline question: My experience with EBD tells me that if students feel like part of a learning community, with a large degree of ownership of their own learning, they're less likely to be bored, frustrated, overwhelmed or left out, all of which can lead to trouble.

At the same time, I think it's naive to expect EBD to eliminate discipline problems entirely. Lisa and I recently dealt with a fairly serious one in that same honors class. In this case, however, we resorted to a more conventional approach. When a reprimand and a talk in the hall failed to get results, we turned the individual over to the administration.

Using EBD, we might have debriefed the situation by asking three questions: What happened? So what? What next? Then maybe we’d brainstorm a Standard Operating Procedure for such situations, written by the class.

My first reaction is that it sounds like it would take too much class time. It would be hard to maintain confidentiality, and it seems unlikely that trust would be restored.

But the conventional approach, while briefer, got the same results. Word got out to the rest of the class, the offender was marginalized by the group, and trust never came back, as subsequent events proved. It took less time, but it didn't work.

That's one of the major issues in EBD vs. conventional teaching. How much control is the teacher willing to give up? That includes control of time as well as control of the lesson plan. In this case, we felt the seriousness of the offense made it necessary for us to take over. You can’t leave discipline up to students, can you?

But you could say the same thing about the lesson plan. Isn't defining literary terms too important to leave up to ninth-graders? Maybe not.

Many teachers and parents would say: "It would be nice if life were like that, but life isn't. And we are here to prepare our students to deal with life as it is, not as we’d like it to be." Implicit in that, of course, is the assumption that life can't ever be the way we'd like it to be, so there's no point in trying. So we don't try, and it isn't -- a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don’t know the answer to my friend’s question, but I’m glad she asked. It's important for me to think about it.