HIGH TECH, LOW TECH, NEW TECH, OLD TECH -
If it helps Us Learn - WE USE IT !"TM
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Just as there are cycles of student
performance and teacher response, there have been cycles of “educational
reform”. In many schools there appears to be
a three year cycle of student performance. One class appears to be a super
engaged group, the next year’s class appears to be fairly normal, and the
following year’s class is a “Katy bar the door” group. Every nine or
twelve years the third group breaks down the door! There also appears to be a five year
cycle of teacher performance. While many teachers may struggle their first two
years, by year five they feel they know it all, get bored, and either move out
(or up into administration).
The really good ones reinvent themselves, try new things, and yet are pragmatic
and “don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater”. In educational reform, there appears
to be a nine to twelve year cycle. Whenever some state legislator dreams of
higher office or some college professor covets consulting fees, a new education
reform movement is born. Neither has been in a public school classroom on a day
to day basis for years! Occasionally, an administrator with aspirations of
moving up may contribute to the movement (even though they haven’t taught a
class on a day to day basis for years either). The really creative reformer slaps a
new name on an old idea, attends the National School Board Convention, and sells
his “reform” to school boards across the country. If all goes well, he can
hire himself out as a consultant (at several thousand dollars a day) to train
the district’s teachers in this new “educational delivery system” that
will cure “the problems of the schools”. The reformer says, “We all know that students have multiple intelligences, different learning styles, and you want to raise test scores, so I’ll train your teachers to all use this ONE new educational delivery system”. That’s akin to saying, “You will all teach about diversity, now everybody do it the same way”. (That kind of reasoning is a petitio principi and a reductio ad absurdum.) (Philosophers, economist, and educational reformers like to use a lot of big words so you will think that they know what they are talking about.)
History:
The cultural morass of the 1970’s was individuality (“if it feels
good, do it”). It spawned another reform movement, Individually Guided
Education (I.G.E.). The idea was that teachers should spend all kinds of time
creating Learning Pacs (L-Pacs), students could move at their own pace, and
teachers would meet individually with students while the rest of the class would
diligently work on their L-Pacs. Teachers, of course, would have to grade the
myriad of papers turned in each day. (The century old “one room school
house” with a new name!) I.G.E.
failed. When students completed one L-Pac, they got another one thrown at them
and they eventually shut down. Because they had no Interactive Knowledge Based
education (I.K.B.) or Multiple Learning Styles education (M.L.S.), they
mispronounced even the simplest of terms. The 1980’s saw “quality
circles” in the business and education model. Teachers were “empowered”
(they were given the administrative tasks of scheduling, etc., secretarial
tasks, and told it was not more work, but “empowerment”). The 1990’s saw “Mission
Statements” in both models as school boards agonized over what their mission
was (and teachers suffered under the burden of writing myriad “goals” that
were acceptable to administrators who bought into “Mission Statements”).
However, “The school improvement
plan of 2000” proposes to “fix the problem of the schools” by once again
focusing on the teacher and increasing teacher workload. It sees the teacher as
the problem and proposes a five year improvement plan requiring that experienced
teachers receive more training and do more “paperwork”. “Ok, the teachers are the problem,
so we’ll fix things by having them spend less time with students, less
time in class preparation, and less time in evaluating student performance.
Let’s make them acquire CEU’s, CPDU’s and also make them document and keep
track of all these acronyms! Let’s Require that teachers do this for five
years. Meanwhile, they’ll spend more time out of the classroom and five
years worth of students will probably learn much more (from their substitutes
?).” This is once again following a
failed business model where mid-level executives spend more time in unproductive
meetings than time on the job. Only when education is seen as an art form rather
than a product, will we see true educational reform. Children are not a
“product on an assembly line”. Yet, many reformers focus on fixing the
schools based on their ancient experience in the classroom as students!
(Everybody is an expert on education because they were a student once. That’s
like saying that you know how to fix General Motors because once upon a time you
were a product on their assembly line of the 1950’s or 1960’s.)
The major problem in that approach
is “teacher burnout” as each new “educational reform” imposes new
burdens on the classroom teacher. The result is the loss of experienced
teachers (young and old alike). Trying to make all teachers use the same
“educational delivery system” denies that students have Multiple
Learning Styles and negates the strength that comes from Celebrating Different
Teaching Styles.
Meanwhile, unfettered by new
burdens, classroom teachers will be able to facilitate learning.
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