This is my 23rd year as a teacher, and I’ve developed a number of strong opinions related to education during that time.
Today’s post is the first in an occasional series where I’ll share some of them and invite readers to support them or disagree with them. I’ll publish some of your reactions here. Send them to me at [email protected].
1. Educators need to retire the word “empower.”
Maybe I’m just more sensitive to this wording because of my previous 19-year career as a community organizer, but “empower” means you’re giving power to someone. I just don’t think you can never truly give power to anyone (just like I don’t think you can give “agency” to students or others). Instead, you need to create the conditions where people can gain and apply power themselves. Anything that is given can also be taken away.
Teachers can create the conditions where students can gain power through a number of ways. Some strategies I use include having “student-leadership teams” in my classes who I meet with weekly and who work with me to evaluate the class and deal with any issues that are arising; through choice, such as having students decide for themselves which reading strategy they each might want to use when we’re examining a text or which theme the class should cover next; and through asking them to complete a weekly form providing class feedback and my acting on it.
2. School districts need to stop paying for “inspirational” speakers to lecture teachers.
I don’t care how engaging the speaker is, or how good their message is, I don’t want to hear about their teaching tales from long ago sharing lessons they did that required a crazy amount of out-of-school hours to complete or cost a ton of money that our schools don’t have now. Plus, none of us had a relationship with the speaker before they came in, and we’ll never see them again!
Instead, how about maximizing the talent districts have in the classrooms right now and inviting their own teachers to speak about practical ideas, along with ways for follow-up connections? Or creating long-term relationships with people outside the district who have expertise in areas your own teachers don’t.
Or, if you don’t like either of those options, just giving us that extra hour for prep time would be nice.
3. Every educator should learn about the principle of subsidiarity.
Subsidiarity comes out of Catholic philosophy and suggests that people who are most affected by problems tend to have pretty good ideas on how to solve them. When I was a community organizer, we often found that people suffering the effects of a lack of unaffordable housing and inaccessible child care, or were concerned about high-crime in their neighborhoods, typically had better ideas on how to respond to those problems than so-called experts whose response was typically that nothing could be done.
In education, districts can apply this principle by listening more to teachers, particularly through our unions. As a teacher, I have found success by often soliciting parents/guardians’ advice on how I could best reach their child. After all, they are the experts in the kids they’ve often raised for 15 or more years! See my earlier opinion on the word “empower” for ways I’ve applied this principle with students in the classroom.
4. Stop already with the “direct instruction” versus “inquiry” fight—the answer is inductive learning.
Educators, and researchers, spend tons of time debating which form of teaching is better —direct instruction or inquiry. As in most of these kinds of debates, there are appropriate times for both. Even better, though, inductive learning often takes the best of both of those instructional strategies and can make for engaging and effective classes.
Inductive learning is basically a matter of guiding students to identify patterns and explain the reasoning behind those patterns. They function as detectives. It can include students categorizing teacher-created data sets, which can be texts or just about anything else. I taught a science class once to ELLs where students were learning about the density of water, and they were testing out a variety of objects to see if they would float or not.
Or it could be using concept attainment, where a teacher shows a list of “good” and “bad” examples, and students have to work together to identify why the items are listed under each one.
5. Foundations and/or public entities should give teachers $10,000 each to spend on their students as they see fit.
It’s time for foundations, or the feds, or a state to start an education equivalent to the increasingly successful guaranteed-cash-grant programs where families are being provided no-strings attached monies.
In other words, instead of only spending money on experimental education research projects that tend to fail and are not teacher-initiated, why not give a large group of teachers $10,000 each to spend on their students anyway they deem fit—books, field trips, snacks, bean bag chairs, etc. Really, is there any downside to doing something like that?
I welcome your reactions!
By the way, a few of these opinions have previously appeared in my other teacher resource-sharing blog.
