U.S. school gives Winnipeg teacher new perspective on old-school teaching

A school that's the subject of a film screening Wednesday opened the eyes of St. John's-Ravenscourt School teacher Matt Henderson to a new way of teaching.

Henderson spent a morning at High Tech High, a public kindergarten to Grade 12 school in San Diego, Calif., that is the focus of the film Most Likely to Succeed, which will screen at the University of Winnipeg at 8 p.m.

"There aren't bells that are telling kids to shuffle around," he said. Instead, teachers work together to design projects and hands-on experiences that will educate their students. 

The film argues the purpose of education from the beginning of the 20th century was to meet the needs of an industrial society. The documentary is meant to make people re-imagine what students and teachers could do with the education system today.

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The students at High Tech High work on projects that are relevant to themselves in the morning, then work in an internship placement and apply what they learned.

"It's very much like how adults work — it's collaborative, it's paced to the individual student, but it's participatory and democratic so everybody is bouncing off ideas on each other," Henderson said. "There was a real purpose and a real direction in terms of how is it that we use the experience of the student to create educative experiences that are transformational."

The documentary looks at the impact innovation is having on the U.S. economy and the consequences if the education system fails. 

"It has sort of opened my eyes up to the possibility in particular to team teaching and collaborating with other educators," said Henderson.

What Henderson remembers best from when he was a student are the moments when he and his teacher told stories or read stories together, he said. 

"When I had a passionate teacher who truly was invested in understanding my experience and then designed experiences based on that to challenge me, and cause that sort of frustration and disequilibrium, and help me through that," he said.

As a teacher himself, Henderson said he and his colleagues try to use students' experiences to help them learn.

"Other times we fail to create that relationship, and that's frustrating as well," he said. 

If the public education system does transform, Henderson said it should be done in a way that respects what teachers have been doing for decades.

"The danger in sort of throwing out the stuff we've been doing for the last 100 years is that there are unbelievable teachers who are changing lives in schools today," he said.

The University of Winnipeg faculty of education and St. John's-Ravenscourt School are screening Most Likely to Succeed Wednesday in Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall at the University of Winnipeg