For the past ten years, I have been asking my 9th grade English students to ponder an inquiry question for the year: What is the purpose of education?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We examine this question from many angles. Is the purpose of education to ensure future gainful employment? To encourage future happiness? To help students discover and practice their passions? To help students to become engaged, thoughtful citizens?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of those are possible purposes, but all of them involve one thing: gaining abilities. Gainful employment, happiness, practicing a passion, and thinking all involve skillsets that need to be developed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don’t think anyone would disagree with this statement: Education should grow the abilities of students, and of the adults in our schools. Every adult involved in education should be model for students of growing abilities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that is not what we have done with teachers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I trained to be a teacher, I learned a varied skillset that helped me survive my first chaotic years in the classroom, a skillset that eventually helped me to thrive. I knew how to think deeply about what I wanted my students to be able to do, how to teach them to do that thing, and how to motivate them by framing that skill so it was something they want to do. I knew how plan the arc of a school year. I knew how to plan a unit, how to blend reading and writing so that they fed into each other, how to encourage student creativity and autonomy, and how to run a specific class period so students left feeling they could do something they couldn’t before the class started. I knew how check for their understanding in different ways that involved the students’ own interests and didn’t depend on standardized questions. I learned how to deal with discipline problems without resorting to punishment. I learned how to engage a class and how to create a classroom community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But nowadays, not only are most of those skills not encouraged – they are basically forbidden. Want to think about what your students need? Not allowed. Everything must be benchmark aligned. Want to plan year or a unit? Not so fast. You have a curriculum map and a pacing guide: no need to think about any of that. Do I want to think about blending reading and writing, encouraging student creativity, or designing individual lessons? No need. The text book and curriculum guide tell you how to run your lessons. Creativity is no longer valued by the system – just success on multiple choice questions. Want to develop your own style of classroom management that works on your relationships with students and uses intrinsic motivation rather than carrots and sticks? Why bother? There’s a reward app for that! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If education should be growing everyone’s abilities, then our system is failing teachers. We now have teachers who not only can’t plan a year, a unit, or a lesson. They often don’t even want to. We have deprofessionallized and de-skilled the teaching profession. Teachers aren’t encouraged, and indeed aren’t allowed to think. They should be models of thinking, not models of compliance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of this standardization was designed to hold teachers “accountable.” What it has done instead is held teachers down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don’t it’s an accident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the past ten years, I have been asking my 9th grade English students to ponder an inquiry question for the year: What is the purpose of education? We examine this question from many angles. Is the purpose of education to ensure future gainful employment? To encourage future happiness? To help students discover and practice Read More >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[182],"tags":[395,422],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1320"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1320"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1324,"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1320\/revisions\/1324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrfitz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}