Link This |
Email this |
Blog This |
Comments (8)
Saving Tinkerbell! On the importance of clapping
February 6, 2008
The other night in St. Louis, during the
METC conference, I had dinner with
Steve Dembo and
David Jakes, fellow bloggers, fellow educators. The casual dinner talk suddenly turned serious. Over the course of the day, we'd spoken to a few too many educators who responded to our ideas for new learning strategies, in fact to any new ideas, with all too familiar "yeah, but . . ." answers.
Our dinner conversation turned to those issues that frustrate the hell out of us, arbitrary filtering of sites and tools, and then, specifically the national focus on AYP that moves so many educators away from what we know, and what experts and researchers tell us, good teaching looks like. ISTE's new
NETS standards and
AASL's new Standards for the 21st Century Learner, as well as the
Partnership for 21st Century Skills, focus our attentions beyond teaching basic skills. They ask us to spend our energies on problem solving, information fluency, collaboration, communication, and creativity. The huge disconnect looms like an 800 lb. gorilla in our classrooms. The research we read and the standards we adopt are not valued beyond our educational organizations and our conferences.
At some point in that dinner conversation, David proposed something akin to this:
given our current political situation, and educational infrastructures, it would be near impossible for us to see change in our lifetime. And David contended that significant change cannot occur outside of a crisis.
Is this a crisis?
For too many of us, the intense obsession with NCLB has changed what school looks like. It has significantly narrowed curriculum and options for learners.
Many of us are forced to put alll other learning on the back burners and spend weeks/months of class time reviewing and drilling for upcoming two-subject state tests. Many of us abandon authentic and creative performance assessments because state tests do not value them, because our administrators arethemselves judged by whether or not their schools continue meet increasingly rising standards for AYP. As a result, administrators fear that their decent and good schools will be labeled as failures by a metric that ignores much of the good their schools and learners really do achieve.
Despite all the creativity and energy they have for their chosen profession, for their grades and their content areas, teachers are encouraged to focus exclusively on drilling the items measured on high stakes assessments. While some students have been
caught up by our focus on NCLB, so many others, who may not need catching up, have been, in fact, held back.
Somewhere along the line, many schools have lost faith. We've lost faith that if we teach well and creatively, if we ask students to read and write and analyze across the content areas we teach, our students will improve their reading and math scores.
So many of our schools now focus most of their energies on what we call “the bubble kids”--learners just above and just below the proficient line on the state assessment. In many schools, this may be a very small group. In many schools, other learners have other needs.
What we are now doing to and for students who have no issues with passing the state assessments is akin to neglect.
(If you haven't already read it, please take a look at
No Dentist Left Behind, a now-classic tongue-in-cheeck essay on one-size-fits-all assessements written by John Taylor, retired superintendent of Lancaster County Schools.)
My neighbors' children lost a music teacher. I've seen art programs decimated. (My own daughter did the rest of school, predominantly because doing the rest of school allowed her to do art.) Elementary teachers now spend far less time teaching the social studies concepts critical for global citizenship and other concepts not formally measured. Many schools teach two subjects only. Although it was never the intention of the NCLB program, local leaders and local consequences encourgage schools to let
untested programs go.
Interesting evidence of this shift--vendor representation on educational conference exhibit floors is overwhelmingly more about assessment than creativity and invention. Assessment is a booming industry.
I do no know a single educator who is
delighted with the improvements brought about by NCLB.
And so . . .
When I read the news about the Facebook
anti-FARC mobilization last week, it occurred to me that as educators, we could learn a lot from young people and how they are beginning to use technology to mobilize.
It occurred to me that far too many of us are speaking far too quietly in our faculty rooms and at conference dinners. It occurred to me, that my fierce little community of bloggers is not blogging or networking as effectively as our students. We are not harnessing the power of the technology we ourselves use and live on to inspire change. We could, we should, begin to focus our blogs ala
Howard Rheingold's SmartMobs.
At that dinner with Steve and David, I moved the conversation to Peter Pan. "Every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies,' somewhere there is a fairy that falls down dead."(James Barrie.)
In the play, Peter was an activist--at least enough of an activist to step out of his story and address his audience directly, passionately.
Like Peter in the play, like Rheingold in SmartMobs, it may be the right time in this crisis to turn to our audience, to turn to the multiple audiences we have so quickly generated through our blogs.
Do we still believe in creativity and imagination? Do we still believe that curiosity and problem solving have a place in learning? Do we still believe in art and music and history and theater? Do we believe in fairies? Can we save Tink before it is too late? Can we clap loud enough to save what we know works in our schools?
We’ve got to save our schools for the many curious and creative learners we now leave behind. Is NCLB our FARC? Can our new social networking abilities make any real difference?
David doubted me when I suggested that teachers gathering together online might develop a voice for change, that we could clap loud enough. But I believe we CAN clap loud enough, that we can BLOG loud enough.
I believe we can blog loud enough for the candidates and our leaders to hear us and help us truly reform education for learners.
Posted by Joyce Valenza on February 6, 2008 | Comments (8)
