The Ideal School

The ideal school is the school that has teachers who use every model of teaching available not only for accomplishing curriculum goals but as a means of research and to prepare students to be more efficient learners in the future. Teachers are researchers, constantly striving to perfect their craft while preparing students to learn how to learn.

Curriculum goals are the same; learning to read, compute and analyze mathematical problems, understanding the world and its environment, engaging in sports and the arts, etc. However, an extension of the curriculum that is often overlooked, is the various models of teaching that help the students not only gather knowledge but learn how to; take control of their learning, work in groups, value the opinions of others, negotiate and argue. These models of teaching and learning are the foundation of a more holistic approach to education. These models, outside of increasing knowledge, have the added value of increasing the social, personal, behavioral and informational processing aspects of learning that help student become a much more independent, efficient and empathetic member of society.

The ideal school will use these models to build the students understanding of how they learn. Just as teachers and parents try to mold students to become independent and responsible adults, the ideal school will try to develop the students' mind in such a way that they gain knowledge and understand innately how they have acquired that knowledge so as to become more efficient and independent learners for the future. As they develop learning strategies through models , such as, "inductive thinking", for instance, they learn to employ those strategies in and outside of class, "Actively constructing knowledge"(P13) by building concepts and organizing information as they learn. This is what Joyce calls "developing cognitive control"(P. 13)

This schools also understands the implications of the academic , personal and social domains that affect the construction of knowledge in the student. Knowledge is not just transmitted from teachers, but created in their own minds as they react to information in school and their environments. In other words, how they learn is affected by the world around them and their experience of it. The various models of teaching build upon one another, covering as many areas and aspects of learning to increase students metacognitive control. In so doing, teachers learn more about how their students learn and increase their knowledge of teaching and learning strategies. Students grow into independent learners and thinkers through repetition of these strategies and the creations of what Joyce refers to as optimal mismatches. When the teacher is actively researching his/her students, then he/she can produce lessons that build on previous ones in such a way that each students is challenged to grow in a certain domain while not