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More Power to the Teachers
Posted:
Jun 27, 2001 1:15 PM
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> You tell me what the teachers risk losing when their
> experimenting goes bad, then we can discuss this further.
My teacher Buckminster Fuller called himself 'Guinea Pig B' because
he saw his life as a series of experiments with himself as the
principal subject. I think this is a healthy attitude. A teacher
is a student of his or her discipline, and experiments in effective
teaching methods are likewise experiments in learning. "This made
it very clear to me, so let's see if others find this enlightening
as well" -- this is how John Saxon operated. As the article pointed
out, he was a rather weak student in school and it's not necessarily
the case that his approach will work best for all students (or all
teachers). But it certainly works for some -- and has the positive
side effect of raising test scores, which tend to weight some forms
of learning more heavily that others.
If the teacher is a principal source of curriculum content, and
people know this, then there's more accountability. In many college
classrooms, a teacher will use a text she or he co-authored as a
part of the syllabus -- why not? I'm suggesting that with today's
technology, it's easier for this to become the norm in earlier
grades as well -- not that every teacher publishes a text book,
but that the school is based around a curriculum server that
faculty, students, parents and other members of the community
evolve together over time (a collaborative effort).
Teachers will be among the primary content providers of course
because that's their job (parenthetical remark: no need for mass-
publishers to further pad their already overly fat text books to
accomodate the potential needs of such a community-based school,
ala Guy's model -- there's enough autonomy here to cut loose from
mass-publishing entirely).
In a school where teachers aren't principal content providers, but
rather purvey content selected by administrators, it becomes much
easier to focus on text books when playing the blame game. And when
parents regard themselves as passive consumers of a service
called "the education of my kid(s)", that too warps the situation
away from a real community-based enterprise, wherein parents are
considered primary educators as well. As a member of a cooperative
school myself, our family is expected to contribute 100 hours
annually in volunteer time, some of it in the classroom. I've been
doing geometry seminars with 1st and 2nd graders.
I'm looking for more accountability, not less, just as you are. But
I don't think the answer is to cast teachers as cogs in the machine
with little say over what materials they want to use. It's still
experimentation, but on a large, unwieldy scale. The inertial forces
are too great. Once an ineffective curriculum is entrenched across
100s or 1000s of schools, it becomes extremely difficult to dislodge
it. Were the experiments more locally focussed, on the other hand,
the feedback loops could be faster/tighter, with the teacher free to
change directions rather quickly, if this is what's indicated.
To complete the picture, I'd definitely like to give more parents
and students more choices as to where they get their educations. I'd
like to see a greater mix of in-school and at-home, without this
strong line between "homeschooler" and "classroomer" -- there's a
whole spectrum in between that's not well-covered at this point, in
my experience.
As I said in my initial post, I'm addressing the structural
obsolesence of top-down, hierarchical, 17th century factory-like
institutions and their unsuitability when it comes to providing a
healthy working environment for students and teachers alike.
Kirby
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