Teachers Are Learners, Too

Please visit this blog–Are You Sick Of High Paid Teachers.  I will be interested to read your comments about the thoughts you experienced as you read the blog and comments.

If you are a middle school social studies teacher, check this out.  What is your response?

Here’s One Way!  Is it THE way?

Have you ever read a book (about education) that “says” what you wish you would/could have said half as well?  Here it is–ONLY CONNECT, by Dr. Rudy Crew!  If you are responsible for learning–we all are, both ours and others’–you must read Dr. Crew’s practical, effective presentation of “The Way To Save Our Schools.”

Although those who visit this blog site can count on reading numerous “look what I found” entries I have gleaned from this book, we all should buy a copy and connect with Dr. Crew’s practical provisions about teaching and learning for ourselves.

The first nugget, quoted from Only Connect:  “The four qualities of a mature and conscious contributor to society are

1. Personal Integrity
2. Workplace Literacy
3. Civic Awareness
4. Academic Proficiency”

“When we talk about education right now, we still concentrate on the last one, the academics, just as we did at Meadowbrook almost forty years ago, and consider the other three as somehow outside of the discussion.  THAT is our central educational mistake.”

There’s more, but you really need to read it yourself.  After you have begun to read the book, I look forward to your providing comments to the blogs related to Dr. Crews’s writing. 

In a February 14 entry at Will Richardson’s blog (Weblogg-ed) I noticed with much interest the following:

“Our kids’ futures will require them to be:

• Networked–They’ll need an “outboard brain.”
• More collaborative–They are going to need to work closely with people to co-create information.
• More globally aware–Those collaborators may be anywhere in the world.
• Less dependent on paper–Right now, we are still paper training our kids.
• More active–In just about every sense of the word. Physically. Socially. Politically.
• Fluent in creating and consuming hypertext–Basic reading and writing skills will not suffice.
• More connected–To their communities, to their environments, to the world.
• Editors of information–Something we should have been teaching them all along but is even more important now.

There’s more, obviously. But I’m curious. What would you add? Or what would you push back against?”

Based on the other reading and listening I am doing, I believe Will is on target.  My question:  How are we in education doing at preparing our students for this future?

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.”