Calvin Project

The Calvin Project

Introduction

Welcome and thank you for joining the Society for Undoing Serious Ills in Education (SUSIE). As you surely know, we are dedicated to salvaging the educational experiences of remarkable but troubled kids across the planet. Currently, one of our field agents has been tracking the experience of a boy named Calvin. Calvin is nothing less than a child prodigy. His imagination and creative insight are off the charts. Based on his ability to created a whole imaginary world centered around his stuffed tiger Hobbs, we believe he could be the next Tolkein or Lucus. Or, based on his snow creations, he could be the next Picasso. However, based on his school experience thus far, it is exceedingly more likely that he will be the next unreliable worker at a fast food joint. THIS MUST NOT HAPPEN! That's why we're assigning you to the case. We need you to diagnose the problem with Calvin's experience and develop solutions. We're counting on you! The development of one of our nation's great minds is at stake! Don't let us down!

To get you started, we archived the footage of Calvin's educational life captured by our undercover agent. To preserve the anonymity of Calvin's identity, the footage was run through our Cartoon-Convertatron. Thus, all footage appears as cartoons you might see in the Sunday paper. [Note: due to a security leak, much of this footage was posted in newspapers for a number of years before we caught the problem.] Just click on the link below to access this footage.

Archive of Calvin's Educational Experience

The Problems

A team at SUSIE has completed an initial analysis of the archive data. They determined that six major problems exist that, if not corrected, will doom Calvin to a wasted educational experience and dead-end career track. YOU MUST DISCOVER THE CAUSE OF THESE PROBLEMS AND FIND SOLUTIONS! Here are the problems:

1. Calvin routinely displays inappropriate behavior.

He makes obnoxious comments, writes obnoxious answers on his tests, cheats, torments our undercover agent, and so on. Calvin will never get far in education if he keeps these behaviors up.

2. Calvin displays troubling motivational patterns.

He is bored and distracted. He doesn't seem to care about school. He is not self-regulated. His main goal seems to be to avoid doing work. And he blames failure on others or a lack of test-taking ability. This not a good thing.

3. Calvin's learning is ineffective.

He forgets things soon after he learns them and struggles to accurately apply his learning to real-world situations. Education is rather pointless if you don't remember or can't apply anything.

4. Calvin holds on to existing misconceptions.

He has some misunderstandings about the world and he holds on to these misunderstandings even after instruction to the contrary. Needless to say, this is a problem.

5. Calvin's learning is decontextualized.

His learning is disconnected from authentic situations. We could say this of almost all students, but it's still a problem.

6. Calvin's learning is not transformative.

His learning lacks meaning and makes no difference in his everyday experience. This is perhaps the most serious problem of all. Great things happen because great minds are inspired by powerful ideas. There is a real danger that the disconnect between his school and everyday experience will lead Calvin to become so turned off by educational ideas that he will never open his mind to them. As a result, his learning (what little results) will not be transformative and Calvin's potential to transform our experience will be lost. Well, he might still transform it, but not in a good way!

Initial Ideas

Your first step is to develop a set of preliminary ideas or hypotheses about the cause of the problems. You will do this by submitting your ideas to the appropriate discussion forum in our top secret Blackboard communication interface. I will summarize the initial ideas and post them here.

Sophisticated Ideas and Solutions

As your investigation of Calvin progresses, we anticipate that you will develop sophisticated ideas about the cause of his problems and sophisticated solutions for these problems. Below are links to pages dedicated to each problem. Your brilliant analysis, insight, and intervention plans will be posted on these pages.

Dr. Pugh's Homepage