
By Janelle McGann
It makes sense that students might find it helpful to know where they’re going with their learning.
In the early 1970s, in an article entitled The view from the student’s desk, late American psychologist, academic and author Mary Alice White compared the experience of a student to that of a sailor…
…on a ship sailing across an unknown sea to an unknown destination. An adult would be desperate to know where he is going. But a child only knows he is going to school… The chart is neither available nor understandable to him … Very quickly, the daily life on board the ship becomes all important… The daily chores, the demands, the inspections become the reality, not the voyage, nor the destination.