Divergent Curriculum

The "drill & kill" teaching technique works for some students, but others struggle with it. Education in the United States has been a topic of debate for several years. One of the most significant issues is statistics/data collected from standardized tests of U.S. Students continues to drop in rank with other Western Countries. While this occurs, lawmakers have neglected the issue, parents haven't advocated enough for change, and educators (especially public school) are blatantly ignored. In order to steer away from the drill & kill style; teachers need adequate resources/funding (ex. smaller class counts & new materials such as textbooks), incentives for current teachers, make appealing as a career choice for those pursuing higher education after high school.

Drill & kill is a teaching style that emphasizes repetition for memorization (Edublox, 2016). This method, convergent thinking, give one correct answer to a problem, which isn't always realistic in life.  This type of learning often makes it difficult for "hands-on" learners to comprehend the material.

According to Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of Intelligence, people are grouped/classified into three categories of thinking types. The types are analytical, creative, and practical. Analytical are most likely to comprehend and retain the information they are taught through utilizing evaluation and comparisons. Creative are most likely to struggle or fail with the drill and kill because they're more "hands-on" learners needing to make connections through the action for comprehension. Lastly, practical thinkers utilize common sense to apply knowledge to new material learned. Thus practical thinkers may also have difficulty learning under convergent thinking.

Ideally, teachers should assess pupils to gauge better how to effectively and efficiently identify the best approach for each to comprehend the material. Unfortunately, it would be a daunting task for teachers to do this under current circumstances with large classroom sizes and little resources available to assist with a possible massive restructuring of material/lectures.

Adding divergent thinking to studies would be a good idea to make the curriculum more engaging for all students, while also leveling the playing field for pupils who struggle with mundane, repetitive material they struggle to comprehend.  Adding critical thinking structured classes with open-ended solutions to lectures and class interactions would benefit all students forcing more temporal thinking instead of a recital. This also would be easier for the instructor to implement/integrate into daily classes than restructuring the dynamic of the classroom. One should identify that it would help kids build social skills by interacting and conversing ideas as a class. Socializing is critical for developing children and using it in the classroom would greater increase chances of peers building relationships with one another. For example, Azmitia and Montgomery analyzed child peer interactions in a  controlled experiment; the dependent variable was children grouped with friends or children grouped with random peers. They observed better communication and better problem solving occurred in the friend group due to familiarity and less hesitance to engage with the group (Azmita & Montgomery, 1993).
Critical thinking is a great everyday tool adults use in everyday life, shouldn't we introduce it to people at younger ages to better exercise the skill as they develop?

References

• Azmitia, M.; Montgomery, R. (1993). Friendship, Transactive Dialogues, and the Development of Scientific Reasoning. Social Development, 2, Pg. 202-221. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227902146_Friendship_Transactive_Dialogues_and_the_Development_of_Scientific_Reasoning

• Edublox. (2016, July 08). "Drill and Kill" - Is Learning by Rote an Outdated Technique? Retrieved from https://www.edubloxsa.co.za/learning-rote-outdated-technique/