When public school students graduate (commence), what should they be capable of? How are our schools hitting or missing the mark?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Join us on Tuesday, August 27, 2024, at 1:00 PM Eastern as Mac and Jeff delve into the above question during our next gathering of SALON 360°
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Mac & Jeff Set the Stage for Salon 360°
Within school systems, I noticed three things I’d like to share, from my experience:
- Every new school year brought a new theme. Back to basics, Creativity, No Child Left Behind, Self-Esteem, Schools without Walls, Put the Damn Walls Back!!#%^, and so forth.
- These themes were inserted primarily by politics or profit. Education programs, like standardized tests, are BIG business. Loudly trumpeted movements get people elected as well and principles/administrators hired.
- The students and the teachers were expected to ‘get in step with the program’, the central office beating the drum. Neither’s input was solicited. The wave was most often directed by people who were trained to be, and saw themselves as, administrators, not as teachers and not as partners in vibrant learning.
I believe students should be the primary facilitators, from day one, in learning design and delivery. I have seen it happen, and I was filled with wonder and joy at what happens when children are in charge of the whole process, supported rather than directed.
Teachers are vanishing from the field (like doctors and nurses from theirs). Finding replacements is focusing on the wrong thing: $. My first question: Why do you think that’s happening? I have my surmises, and I’d like to hear everyone’s. Let’s focus on answers rather than THE ANSWER, please.
My second question: Since public education presumes equality as well as equity, is there anything that every public school in America consistently provides for every child?
I suggest we don’t need tweaking. We need truth, outcome focus, and wicked problem-thinking.
Jeff: I’ve been involved in the K-12 field of education for 50 years:
As a high school history teacher, a developer of classroom and professional development materials (Scott Foresman, Prentice Hall, Pearson), a consultant to school administrators, an author on how school leaders can develop an effective culture of change, and a podcast host who interviews reform-minded educators.
My takeaways from those years:
- Our K-12 education system hasn’t reevaluated its purpose in light of what society and its children need, given the problems we face. The system was designed more than 150 years ago to standardize the teaching of foundational content and skills and assess students’ knowledge. Kids were seen as receptacles to be filled with knowledge and skills provided by the teachers standing at the head of the room.
- Large government-driven reform programs at the federal or state levels fail for various reasons and should not drive change. They are bureaucratic institutions designed to protect themselves. Thought-leader-driven reform programs generally seek to change something at the margins of education—but not the system as a whole—e.g., an improved method of reading, or “flipped learning” where students study tomorrow’s lessons at home the night before class, or content is “scaffolded” to meet the developmental needs of learners. These changes are not ‘bad,” but this method of incremental change, which is known as “the shiny penny syndrome,” is seen as the answer to the larger problem.
- Research shows that student creativity and innovation plummet from third grade on. Why is that? Research also clearly shows that the two classroom practices that drive the largest effect size in student learning are (1) when teachers evaluate what’s working and not working in their instruction and (2) when teachers help students understand how they attempted to solve problems. These practices are not universally followed.
- K-12 education is increasingly politicized.
I believe our K-12 education system should be redesigned to help students gradually identify and explore their interests. It should be redesigned to help students become informed citizens, critical thinkers, and collaborative problem-solvers. Learning should be project-based, and what we mean by “the classroom” should be reevaluated. What do you see as the benefits of such a system? Drawbacks?
Pre-service teachers and administrators need to be much better schooled in the neuroscience of learning and trauma. It is a fact that students can’t effectively process information, aka learn, if their amygdala—their emotional center—is hijacked through adverse childhood experiences.
Resources
- Dr. Gabor Maté
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C75y12ZtdPf/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link - Dr. Peter Gray
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4S5misqoTU/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link - Sir Kenneth Robinson
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3gX632tcR7/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link - The 1776 Curriculum
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hillsdale-college-1776-curriculum-k12-education-conservative-rcna93397 - Sir Kenneth Robinson, Kate Robinson
https://www.edutopia.org/article/what-education/
Thanks, Hope and Jeff.
What you pointed out, Jeff – Student Agency – is key for me. That includes students helping other students to create a learning community. Particulars of content, especially literature and history, are a prickly topic. Was it The Civil War or The War of Northern Aggression? Is To Kill a Mockingbird about tolerance or intolerance? I grow increasingly frustrated with the either/or approach to thinking and learning. Mind cripplers.
Kids are generally much more capable than many schools and adults honor. “Teachers, leave them kids alone,” in full context, has lots of merit (for me). It’s not about removing teachers, but the song could well include ,”Politics, leave them teachers alone.”
Come join us.
Mac
Matt and Jeff, your two perspectives bring back to my mind a training session I was in when the Commone Core Curriculum Content Standards, CCCCS, were released. Attendees were told that one of the factors that led to the CCCS was the lament of college professors. For example, in English courses, a professor would reference Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, and the students would have no frame of reference. They had not been exposed to those pieces of literature. Situating this within the US, for a moment, should there be a common foundation upon which education occurs year by year in schools? Does this lend itself to a base from which the learners and educators then branch out? How does what you are each proposing fit into or then change what occurs in higher education? Best wishes for the upcoming Salon.
Hope, when I was with Pearson Education, I helped develop training materials for the CC. (CC, like other top-down driven programs, suffered from a very poor rollout to educators and parents, which resulted in extreme misunderstanding.) The foundational driver in CC Math and Reading and later in Social Studies and Science was how do we help kids think and articulate their thinking—form reasoned opinions and engage in discourse. Content was seen as something that could enable thinking and discourse rather than only as something to be absorbed—the goal of our current system.
A common foundation? There have been efforts in the past to do this, but it’s challenging to get people to agree, and again, doing so may inadvertently emphasize content absorption rather than thinking. I keep returning to an essential question that we have to ask ourselves in the 21st century: as educators, parents, and citizens, what do we want our kids to know and do with their knowledge when they walk across the stage at commencement?
You ask a good question at the end about higher ed, which could be a Salon discussion by itself. Higher ed can’t be looked at as just college. Schools should expose kids to alternative pathways beyond high school. One of the superintendents I interviewed on Getting Unstuck has lined up more than 700 local partners who can offer students internships that eventually lead to good paying skill jobs. He did this in deference to his community, which simply could not be expected to be saddled with ever-rising college tuition.
I agree with Lynn that we need to look at subjects much more broadly. (I loved Home Ed, and a course in personal finance would be critical!) Kids should have the opportunity to experiment with courses they’re interested in—student agency—beyond the standard four disciplines. My brother took a series of photography courses in high school, and he eventually became a professional photographer. No college! And yes, history is essential. (I’m a former high school history teacher.) I’m all for “true” history if we expose our kids to our full story, including its darker elements.
Hope to see you at Salon on the 27th.
I have some good friends who are public school counselors – one primary school, one high school.
Their case load is unmanageably huge and they do not get much credit – they are at the mercy of lots of pressure from administrators and parents to follow rather than lead.
They’re both worn out by the pressure, not by helping their clients – kids.
The main aim of school orientation activities should be to guide students during their studies, assisting them in choosing the school best suited to their abilities and aspirations, giving them advice on how to best organize courses and subjects. Furthermore, orientation can help students develop an assessment of their skills (hard and soft skills) and their professional goals, offering advice on what they need to study to achieve them.
Too often students make their school choices unconsciously, letting themselves be guided by their families or peer groups; a mistake that can have serious consequences, especially when it comes to job prospects.
School orientation can allow students to focus on the reality that surrounds them so as to acquire greater awareness of their abilities, interests and desires, providing viable methodologies in order to obtain encounters/experiences that enrich their personal path.
I don’t know the effectiveness of school guidance in the USA but I have been interested in what happens in Europe and my experience is that school guidance is currently not sufficiently effective in Europe mainly due to a sort of mistrust regarding its usefulness.
Thanks, Lyn.
Please join us at the Salon on the 27th.
I would love to see children at Commencement (a very important word) with a critical curiosity, a healthy sense of skepticism, and a strong foundation in discriminating science and facts from opinion. What they learn in school may be no less important than that they continue learning.
Mac
Great Article Mac, as I have often said, teachers are not appreciated (good teachers) enough. I feel we need to go back to the basics of Home Economics, teaching how to balance and check monies, savings, wood working, and most of all teaching true History. History is the life line of our progression through life. As a teacher on the side while in Law Enforcement, I taught a class on Introductory to Law Enforcement as a class to have those understand the law outside the realm of Law School. Basic questions that would pertain to most of those in my class at one point or another, ie: alcohol while driving, loitering, curfews, etc. In the end, I saw a transformation among several in the class, some going on I was to find out into the field itself. Great Article.
Hi Lynn – thanks for weighing in here with your experienced insights. As Mac suggested, do join us on 27 July – here’s the registration link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/salon-360-where-shift-happens-tickets-477933741687?aff=oddtdtcreator