A friend of mine who is now retired from the Orlando Sentinel editorial page and who had a hand in publishing some of my education editorials used to start the calendar year with a “full disclosure” list about the beliefs and view points he held that might influence his opinions.
As I begin my 35th year of teaching today (Good grief!), I decided to make a list of my beliefs about education, school, and teaching to clarify my thinking as a welcome 162 ninth-graders and creative writers into my class today. I hope reviewing these beliefs keeps me focused. I hope reading them may prove inspiring or thought-provoking to those of you still in the classroom despite what’s being done to education. I also hope to expand and explain some of these beliefs later. This is not a complete list. It’s what occurred to me while writing.
For what’s it’s worth, here are some of my beliefs about education. In this climate, some of them are pretty radical. But they shouldn’t be.
I believe we don’t talk enough about the purpose or purposes of education except in a very shallow way. “College and Career ready” just skims the surface.
I believe one purpose for education is for increasing the flourishing of the all the human lives in a school. To flourish means to live up to your potential, to be unique, to be creative. Standardizing people, be they students or teachers, is the opposite of helping them flourish.
I believe another purpose for education is to help children be prepared not just for the workplace but for life and citizenship.
I believe education should make us aware of how to think, not what to think; it should make us more aware of our biases and more willing to engage in skepticism, including of our own ideas. It should make us aware of confirmation bias within and propaganda without. It should cultivate intellectual character.
I believe school should value reading, writing, math, science, history, and the arts not only to pass tests or because of their future utility in the workplace, but as objects of both wonder and fascination and as lenses for looking at the world.
I believe education should be as much about asking questions as answer them, and teachers should be models of curiosity. I believe education should be about thinking instead of compliance and teachers should be models of thinking, not models of compliance.
Teachers and students should have the freedom to teach and learn in unique and non-standardized ways, not one-size-fits-all pre-fabricated lessons and assessments. I believe teachers have unique gifts to bring to the classroom, especially their creativity. Killing teacher creativity is bad for teachers and students. How many great teaching ideas never existed because teacher thinking has been killed off?
I believe that if we are the land of the free, our schools should reflect that. We don’t brag about being the land of the compliant, yet that’s all they ask for in schools.
I believe we should err on the side of thinking. I believe we should teach student that there are often multiple, paradoxical right answers in real life, not one right answer decided by a testing company.
I believe reading should include phonics but that our reading instruction should go way beyond it and focus not on nit-picky questions but on meaning and how reading relates to life. I believe we should focus on choosing texts that will make students want to discuss and debate with each other, that will give them useful ideas and incredible characters to take with them into life.
I believe writing is hugely important but is being ignored almost completely by the system. Writing helps students think, find their voices, and discover who they are and what they are about, what they stand for. Writing teaches them how to connect with other people in thoughtful, reflective ways. I believe writing should not be taught as an act of compliance but as a way to think. Tools matter more than rules.
I believe that reading and writing should be taught together: reading is inhaling and writing is exhaling. One without the other seems pointless. If we are going to teach them to analyze the choices an author makes, we need to encourage them to make choices too. If we ask our students to analyze fiction, for instance, we should give them opportunities to write fiction as well – to help them see writer’s craft from the inside. Also, writing fiction is engaging and fun.
I believe we should think “What do want them to be able to do?” in bigger ways than state standards. I believe we should find out where students are now, have a vision for where we’d like them to be, and do anything we need to to get them to that vision. Getting them from here to there by any route needed is different than “Follow this one route – it’s the only way there.” I also believe we make discoveries along the way that change our vision.
I believe teaching is a sacred profession. I believe our goals should be to make students want to keep learning forever.
Starting tomorrow, I hope to put all those beliefs into practice for at least one more year.