Number one and four are my favorites. I'd add Lego cufflinks and Star Wars tie bars to the list too. Plus, this iPhone cover.
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Teachers aren't doctors.
Comparing teaching to medicine gets thrown around a lot. But this blogger makes a great distinction between the two professions.
I've heard this one - "You want to judge teachers by the test results of their students? You don't judge cancer doctors by the survival rate do you?"
or
"Look at medicine - the best doctors work in the hardest fields and with the most severe cases? Does that happen in education?"
or
"You wouldn't take your kid to a doctor who still bleeds them for illness and then puts leeches on them? Then why would you send your kid to a school where they still do mundane worksheets and the teachers lecture all day."
Some comparisons work, but many don't.
Here is a great distinction.
One of the scariest moment of my life occurred when my daughter choked on a tiny plastic wrapper that had been left on the ground. She turned colors. I used CPR and by the time the emergency vehicles arrived, she was okay.
It was a matter of life and death. It wasn't the time to be creative. I wasn't about to deviate from the standard protocol. It wasn't the time to think about how she was feeling. I was consumed with keeping her alive.
In a limited capacity, I was a medic.
But afterward, as she explored her environment, I wasn't fixated on her ability to breath. Instead, I was thinking about her ability to think, to explore, to create. I was consumed by her individual personality and interests. I was dealing with a whole child trying to make sense out of her world.
I was a teacher.
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How to Break Free of Our 19th-Centry Factory-Model Education System.
True. Not much has changed. Does this sound familiar to you?
The result was a publicly-funded system where, in every American classroom, groups of about 28 students of roughly the same age are taught by one teacher, usually in an 800 square-foot room. This model has been the dominant archetype ever since.
Does this need to change?
Yes. And No.
Yes - in that I totally agree with Congressman George Miller when he declared, "School is rapidly become a process, not a place."
First, kids can acquire a ton of knowledge on their own outside of school. Just ask or read the works of John Merrow and Don Tapscott. However, will all kids be motivated to learn and teach themselves outside of class? Ha. No. Yet, they will devote a ton of time to mastering Skyrim or scouring every scene of Inception or developing a website that plots out all the twists and turns of the entire series of Lost or reading every word of the Harry Potter series or painstakingly devising a strategy for their fantasy football draft.
Kids will work like mad when they have "skin in the game" (I stole that from Merrow).
Second, I don't think you need kids of roughly the same age in the same grade. We don't do this anywhere else. In sports? Would you keep a fantastic freshmen from playing on varsity? No. In music? If you have an 8th grader who is a prodigy, do you relegate him to middle school orchestra? No.
Third, do students really need to be taught by just one teacher? Teachers aren't the sole repository of knowledge that they were 100 years ago.
No - in that one great, charismatic and challenging teacher can make the difference with 20 - maybe even 25 - of those kids and get them to learn and demonstrate growth. Nothing - no search engine or apple device - will ever be able to replace that.
Yes - I like this section of the blog
New classroom delivery models allow us to re-imagine new combinations of educator expertise, time, instructional materials, research, physical space, parental support, and (yes) technology in ways that achieve optimal outcomes for students. They begin not by assuming the current model but rather by understanding what it is we want students to be able to do, the measures of success, the resources we have to work with, and our own sense of possibility.
I think this is what is interesting about the flipped classroom. I think it's vital to meet as a whole class, but five days a week? Maybe not. Seat time? Not as important as it was in the past.
Plus, why not offer students to chance to learn from each other in the class and from others not in the class. This is where such things as group work (which has its own drawbacks), google tools, blogs, and cell phones are so important.
I found the overall entry interesting. But I think I find this rebuttal even more interesting.
There is a very real and very serious error underneath what so often passes for the enthusiasm of the reformers. It’s evident in this piece where the author refers to the “factory-model classroom.” The use of “factory” as a metaphor by techno-zealots and reformers, is popular but vacuous. It is just rhetoric. Any great teacher who understands what happens in any real “classroom” knows that. The classroom as learning technology (for what else is it?) is as hardy, as ancient and intransigent as the book… because it works.
That’s why designing “new classroom models” is a contradiction in terms. It’s a bit like saying designing new books. You can’t. You can write them. And before everyone yells “e-books,” they’re still books just as it’s still a classroom. (I know, I wrote one of the very first e-novels.)
One teacher, their skill and knowledge, a group of children and a readiness to learn is all any “factory-model classroom” needs to succeed. It’s ignorance about and the absence of these various elements in so many schools that is the problem. Not the lack of “innovation,” technology or new models.Here is a link to the blog for the author of the rebuttal.
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Here is a story about the hot-bed of everything educational, thanks to Scott Walker: Wisconsin.
A council asks that high schools serve the needs of businesses. That is we need to turn out better employees.
This is interesting.
Certainly, schools need to equip our students with the basic skills to survive in the job market. The problem is, what are those skills? Ask five people and you'll likely get five different answers.
I'm old school when it comes to this. I say give students a great liberal arts education with a very strong dose of math and science.
Liberal arts teaches all the good stuff that Thomas Friedman says students need to master just to get an interview: the abilities to think critically, analyze, view differing perspectives, posit multiple arguments, draw conclusions, and adapt.
Yet, according to this committee, students are lacking the 'soft-skills' --
Call me crazy, but I don't think public education can cure these things. I like what John Merrow said on the "The Bob Edwards Show" recently: Schools are in charge of schooling. But the real educators in a student's life are the parents.
Whenever schools are forced or think they have to make up for parenting, they get away from a core curriculum and do more damage.
Speaking of damage, when schools allow corporations or businesses to 'track' and manipulate kids early on into specific fields - as this passage suggests -
In other words, they will work on developing laws that use the public education system to orient, train, and track kids into the corporate working world at a young age. Rep. Farrow mentioned that he would like that tracking to begin in first grade. But Tim Sullivan, who appeared before the committee as Scott Walker’s recently appointed “Special Consultant for Business and Workforce Development,” has even more ambitious ideas: “In workforce development we say, you begin at birth and end at the grave.”
I fear we are even doing more damage.
Ultimately, and this is as old school as it gets, I think the school's first function is to graduate citizens who can flourish in a democracy. I know that doesn't put dinner on the table, but it certainly helped make us into the most amazing nation on earth.
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How would this be for a first assignment?
What would you redesign about your grade learning experience?
Have students redesign their learning experience from the previous year or semester. Then as a teacher you have the challenge to try and meet that redesign but students will also be challenged to live up to their own design: "Here is the redesigned learning experience that you wanted. So why aren't you making the most of it?"
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