Teachers Are Learners, Too

I recently received an e-mail (from Edward Fields, CEO at HotChalk.com–http://www.hotchalk.com/), part of which invited the audience to “inform me on what you’d change about teaching in general”.  So I took some license with the “teaching” AND the “general” and wrote what follows:

1. We educators need to behave as though we believe that high stakes testing is not the only reality for which we need to prepare our students–we MUST prepare them for success in the 21st Century.
2. Parents need to send their students to school ”ready to learn”.  For that to happen, parents must teach their children the morality (broadly also including  — besides all the forever important right & wrong stuff — work ethic) required for their success as individuals and as members of “teams”.  
3.  Parents and grandparents must behave as though they KNOW that they and we are preparing students for a very different work world than that for which they/we were prepared.  Stop it with the “If it is good enough for Noah, it is good enough for me”!
4. Government (legislators, et al) must join us by funding education that is “best for kids” with NO thought about what is “best for MY re-election.”

If what we are doing isn’t getting us where we want (or need) to go, I wonder why we keep doing it.

One has to wonder how we can think applying more pressure, raising the standards, increasing the amount of professional development (time taken out of the school day/year), adding curriculum pieces (Character educaiton looms as just one example of an increasing area of need.), increasing the amount of testing time (again time taken away from teaching) can bring about improved results.

It seems to me we are quickly approaching the place where educators could justifiably say, “What we are being asked to do just isn’t possible the way we are currently being asked to do it.”

Add to that the very different “product” that will be required in the work world in the 21st century “information/technology age”, and even I can grasp that something needs to change.
In my school I have been lobbying for more time with my students by suggesting we make adjustments in our school-day schedule, and I promise not to give up on that.

Now I have decided that will not be enough. Therefore, I am proposing that we enact a significant departure from “what we have always done.” I believe we now need to move to year-round school. Like it or not, there is no other way we can accomplish what we are being asked to accomplish. My idea of year-round school is an additional 45 days of student contact time. Those 45 days (perhaps some of the other 180 also) could (maybe even should) look very different from the current seat-time approach.

One thing I know–if what we are doing isn’t getting us where we want (or need) to go, we probably shouldn’t keep doing it.