Teaching - In the Construct of Education
Public Education will die because teachers have a job not a vision.
The stars in our classrooms make us look good.
The strugglers make us teach.
Have we forgotten?
The purpose of teaching is not to impress others with what we know but to use what we know to inspire and equip students to become impressive.
The problem is seeking an information age education using an industrial age model. The timeline of age and grade segments within summative assessment is an invention for convenience for quantifying progress not a function or reflection of organic growth. We say learning is lifelong, yet we impose grade levels and act as if time demarcation of learning marks success and attaches failure to those who have a different rhythm and pace.
The constructs of curriculum, instruction, and assessment are interdependent and morphable components of a learning system seamlessly transitioning through applications of analysis, alignment, and articulation. What are the explicit and implicit ideas, beliefs, and values inherent in the chosen content, methodology, and evaluation? How intertwined is the process of moving from simplicity to complexity? How do we build on what students know and honor different ways of learning? “I thought the purpose of education was to open possibility not to narrow it down to one, predetermined legitimate possibility.” Chrystell Reed, Executive Director, Ridgeline Montessori Public Charter School.
The arbitrary standards by which we judge the quality of learning and work are an inadequate measure of the ultimate outcome of the learning experience – the cumulative and complex nature of knowledge and doing. The real standards by which the quality of learning and work can be judged are the creation and application of new thoughts and quality of life as an outcome of learning and work.
Diversity and inclusion begin with the educational process.
Within the conventional construct of education, we are not paying attention to or incorporating the attitudes, thinking, and behaviors that include. Instead, we are highlighting deficiencies rather than celebrating achievements. The messages we send: You don’t count. What you are doing doesn’t matter. What you are learning is inadequate.
“As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.”
There is another way.
“We had found a way of being with students that was sharply different from conventional education. It did not involve teaching so much as it involved a process that we came to think of as the facilitation of learning. It involved a deep trust in students, rather than the distrust prevalent in most classrooms. It involved an attempt to be with the learner in a number of ways. It meant being with the student in a sensitive understanding of his or her own interests, desires, directions. It involved being a real person in the teacher-student relationship, rather than playing a role…It has deceptive simplicity. Actually this way of being is a never-ending process of becoming that can occupy one’s whole lifetime.” Carl R. Rogers, Freedom to Learn
