This is a Work-In-Progress! It needs to gloss all of the terms and principles which appear in the other materials.
In the Learning Partnership Model Learners, Graduates and committed Other Partners are encouraged to participate fully in the ongoing development and improvement of all Learning Programs and Materials. All the materials and the design of all programs is freely offered to any other Learners or groups running educational programs provided they give back their improvements to the community at large. (Share and Share-Alike principle).
See: Creative Commons
In the Keller Plan material to be learned is divided into modules of related material which are
Keller Plan study is normally
Keller Plan courses may have optional and alternative modules and allow many different paths for individuals and groups.
A module or course is only passed if all Learners have mastered all of its core distinctions.
Learning Tree’s intensive Hands-On Courses are an excellent example of the efficiency and power of Intensive Short Courses.
Intensive Short Courses are primarily of value when the material learned
The best STEM-oriented programs I am aware of that have produced excellent results with middle-school aged Learners have been the ones operated by Xerox PARC oriented around the Smalltalk environment and those at MIT oriented around Pappert’s LOGO system and Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child projects.
All three of these projects use the principle of immersing the young person in an environment in which the mathematical and physical material to be learned was directly observable and manipulable. Rather than trying to micromanage what the Learners were to do with the material the project staff got the Learners to create interesting collaborative projects and then stepped back into the role of peers and mentors. The result of this approach was that the Learners wound up going very far and fast with their learning and wound up with a solid practical ownership of both the abstract material and the technology.
The project I know best borrowed many of the best ideas from (1) Xerox PARC’s Smalltalk Project, (2) MIT’s LOGO project along with (3) the mastery-oriented technology of the Keller Plan plus (4) one more key ingredient I’ll mention in a moment. That project was the UCSD P-System Project which was responsible for introducing all entering UCSD students in the basics of Computer Science up to writing complex custom programs of their own design. Although the Students in our program were just out of high school, I believe that everything we did would have worked similarly with middle school or high school aged Students.
The additional key ingredient in our UCSD project was creating a path allowing and encouraging the Students to take increasing leadership roles in the project, beginning with assisting in the lab, then contributing materials and finally becoming full-fledged project members. In this way one professor, Ken Bowles, was able to manage a program that simultaneously trained thousands of students every year (with unprecedented academic success) and which also developed a complete operating system and complete set of software tools more advanced than any then available on microcomputers.
My experience of bright young Learners is that when they are motivated they can learn a lot faster than conventional instruction can spoon-feed them. I believe that our best approach to empowering Learners is to leverage their passion for learning and their natural orientation towards self-direction by getting them invovled in collaborative projects which give them room to learn at their maximum rate using materials and technology they can use ongoingly. Our best role is in the training of peers and mentors, which will eventually largely consist of the graduates of our programs. We should also make maximum use of the amazing range of exisiting materials which are now available through the Internet and engage the Learners in projects which adapt and improve those materials based on their experience. I think that this kind of approach will maximize the future success of our Learners!
MIT experience PARC experience
Tech Shops, Object Printerrs
UCSD Physics, UC Irvine’s Mathematics
The originator:
If the originator holds onto control after liftoff:
The originator:
The master originator: