If... the student's viewpoint

I have been reading a book of provocative questions with the intriguing title of "If- Questions for the game of life.' by Mcfarlane & Saywell. (ISBN 0-679-44535-8). It made me think further about planting seeds in the minds of gifted students through promoting discussion of provocative questions requiring answers based on the higher order thinking strategies of analysing and evaluating and having some fun in the process.

• If you could change just one thing about school, what would it be and why?

Student Responses (A group of year 5 special abilities students... 8 in total)
I would have hard challenges for kids to do if they want to. They would be optional and you could choose when to work on them. You could have a challenge for older kids and one for younger kids.Or a hard one and an easier version instead of it being age related. Not just stuff that you could look up on the internet but things that made you really think so that kids could make a difference for something.
Can you give me an example?
Maybe that could be the first challenge! (grinning).

* I would let the kids elect a student to be in charge for maybe an hour to try out their leadership skills and then we would all talk about how it went and what we would like to change next time. It would be like... you know, taking a walk in someone else's shoes.

* I would like to have people who are experts come and just work with the kids who want to learn more about what you need to know to be able to do their jobs. It would be good if the kids could choose who they would like to come.

* I would like to have more discussions like this where we can talk about things and we don't have to write everything down. And it would be good if we could try some of the ideas out.

So we did. Yesterday. We voted on which idea to try out first. Having a student in charge for an hour won. We discussed aims and expectations. Students who volunteered their names were then given a minute each to 'sell' themselves and to explain how they would use the time. (The only perameters being that the time was to be learning focussed and that there was a plan so that the group had success criteria to measure themselves against).  A 'blind vote' gave us the result and that student now has a week to prepare. We are all looking forward to the outcome.
The interesting thing is that any of these suggestions could be implemented.