We need teaching schools to create excellent teachers...

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I believe firmly that the vast majority of teachers are professional people doing a professional job. We are members of a world-wide cohort of professionals who have been drawn toward the most noble of crafts. Despite this, I remain perplexed why we don't in some instances, act in the same manner that defines other professions and vocations. Pre-service teacher preparation and training is one of these instances.

While other professions and trades evidently see the value of pairing their new members with established, expert leaders within their fields, we have not taken full advantage of the opportunity. We do implement mentorship programs for new teachers, and pre-service teachers participate in student-teacher experiences before finishing their undergraduate training, but if these practices are good, why not extend them?

Lawyers article, doctors intern and tradesmen apprentice, but teachers typically don't participate in this form of on-the-job training to the same degree.Why don't we apprentice new teachers? There are teaching hospitals; why not establish "teaching schools?" I see a tremendous upside potential to this concept.

Pairing master teachers with teachers new to the profession seems to me such a simple and logical plan that perhaps the powers that be consider it to be too simple to be effective. I've written on this blog about Occam's Razor; the Law of Succinctness... maybe the simple plan is just what our profession needs to take teacher preparation to the next, more credible level. I envision teaching schools as those that would be partnered with post-secondary institutions making it easy to conduct academic research into best practices, pedagogy, technology, curriculum, etc., while providing a living lab in the school to test the theories through action-research projects and supervised teaching. I can't think of a better way to overlap the theory pre-service teachers are exposed to within their university training experience and the visceral experiences they would have while immersed within the functional school environment.

Let's take the step in education to become more responsible for our newest teacher's levels of effectiveness and success early in their career by supporting them to a higher degree from within the profession. Let's do this by putting pre-service teachers into our schools where they can witness first-hand and learn from the remarkable work that excellent teachers do every day.

We need teaching schools.

Drug and tech companies... too much influence?

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As drug companies influence medicine, is there a concern among educators that tech companies will become too influential in education?

In a market driven economy, I am of the opinion that sometimes wrong actions take place because they haven't been thoroughly and systematically reviewed beforehand. The Vioxx controversy comes to mind. The massive scale prescription of Vioxx proved to be damaging to our collective health to be sure.

The tech world operates in a market economy too. I wonder if we are occasionally sold a bill of goods in the "latest and greatest" tech tool that will advance our teaching practise and our student's abilities. As I write this, I'm actually wondering as far as software goes, why we're being sold anything tech oriented with all the open-source software out there for the taking. To further that idea in the context of education, can we be far away from open-source hardware? I see possibility in big hardware companies taking advantage of the availability of the recycled tech hardware that Moore's Law creates, refurbishing it, and giving it to educational institutions for free under the provision that a partnership is established to help develop software and uses for the hardware that the partner company has a vested interest in.

All I'm trying to say is, in our vigor to remain on top of Moore's Law in providing the most advanced tech integration possible in our schools, are we forgetting in our haste that just because something is "new," that it doesn't automatically mean it is pedagogically good for us or our students?

Every Wednesday off...

Here's one for pondering as we all enter the beginning of a long, new work week... what if we all got every Wednesday off?

Think about it; nobody would work more than two days in a row. I foresee many benefits to this format:

• Every Tuesday evening and Wednesday would be free giving everyone more of that leisure time we all so desperately need to enhance our personal wellness.
• More family time, or time with friends would be so nice.
• More concentrated effort during the other four work days each week would result in higher productivity and less stress for all.
• We'd all be more rested.
• Kids would be more focused in school.

Ten hour days on the work days excluding Wednesday would still result in a forty hour week (if that's even what we need; I question that.)

We so desperately need balance in our lives, and this work week format would provide some.

Quality, not quantity... Why is it always the simplest axioms we have such a difficult time putting to practice?

Homework shouldn't be assigned, it should be inspired!

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My good buddy and colleague, Joe Bower, is a passionate and intelligent person. I just finished reading his last post at his education blog, 'For the Love of Learning'. In The Destructive Forces of Homework, Joe states that,

If we are to walk the talk of life-long learning, we must care how kids feel about their learning. If ever there was a consensus among people, it could be found among kids and their hatred for homework. So if we truly care about students' attitudes towards learning, and we are doing something that is sabotaging that attitude to go on learning, then we have a professional obligation to stop.

OK Joe, I'm going to challenge you on this statement... I totally agree with your first point, "if we are to walk the talk of life-long learning, we must care how kids feel about their learning." This point is inarguable. Perspective is the key to motivation. I would also agree that there is a wide-spread (almost cliche) negative perspective toward homework among the student set, but I ask myself why this is. Do students hate homework, or do they hate what we call homework? I submit the latter is more true.

We need to contextualize homework. If students love what they do in school so much that they want to continue to do it at home, can we not call that homework? The logic you suppose is based on your position that homework is inherently bad, and therefore "sabotaging" student's attitudes to go on learning. I can't necessarily agree. If teachers are engaging students in meaningful and authentic ways at school, and that learning continues at home, (a good thing in my opinion,) I don't think my definition of homework sabotages anything; I actually believe it would enhance learning.

After reading some of the comments on your post, and considering the litany of comments in various teacher circles related to the homework debate, I must say that teachers have done an incredible disservice to the topic of homework in general. True life-long learning as an attitude is something that we should embrace to be sure, but I can't see how that can perpetuate if we are saying learning is defined in such narrow parameters as whether homework is either good, or bad. I cringe when I consider that homework as most people define it, (unfinished work, worksheets for drill or memorization of facts,) is really just more of what already happened in school on any given day, and if we're saying homework is inherently bad, what are we saying about school?

I would like to pose the challenge that homework doesn't have to be absolutely bad. It doesn't even necessarily have to be done as an "assignment" that everyone is expected to do, and that those who don't are somehow punished for as a result. For example, if I asked my class to go home with some basic instructions on how to build a cell battery out of some paper towels, pennies, copper wire, tape and salt water, and the majority of them actually do it, (not because it was for marks, or because I said they had to,) and then brought their excitement and batteries back to class the next day wanting to show the kids who didn't build one, for whatever reason, how they worked, I'm going to say this is a good learning situation, (a true story from my class this past week.) This is also a process I would call homework that certainly doesn't damage attitudes toward learning, but rather improves them.

We don't have a professional obligation to stop sending homework; we have a professional obligation to start sending homework that is meaningful to students, applied to the exciting teaching and learning going on in our schools and that students will do because they want to, not because they have to.

Occam's Razor- The Simplest Path to Education Reform

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Occam's Razor, otherwise known as 'lex parsimoniae' (the Law of Succinctness) is one of my favorite guiding principles. There is a great deal to be learned from applying Occam's Razor, and I think the process of education reform could use a healthy dose of this principle.

According to Wikipedia, the principle of Occam's Razor is attributed to 14th-century English logician, theologian and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham. It is the meta-theoretical principle that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" and the conclusion thereof, that the simplest solution is usually the correct one. We don't tend to lean toward principles like Occam's Razor in education, especially under Third Way structures that have dominated the teaching profession for the last number of years. As a result of the seemingly perpetual top-down quest for higher student achievement, teachers have been spooked, and for good reason. This past February, the entire school staff at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, USA was fired as a result of low student achievement. We have become so engrossed as an institution with externally-applied standards of education, that any regard for decentralized autonomy and customization of teaching and learning to suit local needs has simply disappeared. Government education departments have become so intently focused on standardizing the education system using high-stakes testing processes and statistical analysis that they don't even seem to be aware of the infinite alternatives to the game of natural selection they think they're playing.

This post is about getting back to a routine in education that observes a localized need for learning; one that makes adjustments in real-time according to that need, and that understands there is more than one way to climb a mountain. Every school is different. Even schools from within the same school district have identifiable characteristics that set them apart from all the others. If you don't believe me, ask a substitute teacher who regularly works in different schools within the same district how they feel about their time in the different schools they teach within. It's remarkable how varied their descriptions will be, even between schools that are mere blocks away from each other in the same neighborhood. Every school has its own culture; it's own identity as defined by the unique individual teachers and students that spend their time there. This reality does not appear to favor a unilateral approach to the management of learning that is so prevalent in contemporary education.

So what is the alternative? I would argue there is more than one alternative; in fact there is no end to the alternatives. Do we need standards in education? Yes. One would be ignorant to assert otherwise. Here's where Occam's Razor comes in. Our tendency to multiply entities beyond necessity has been drummed into us in our never-ending quest to find the latest and greatest strategy that will raise those all-important test scores. We have completely forgotten that the simplest solution is usually the correct one. "Less is more, less is more"... we need to drum this into our heads until it resonates louder than the current more is more perspective that so many teachers subscribe to.

I envision a curriculum that removes all overflow and gets down to the critical, timeless and core elements of knowledge within each subject area. Once grounded in this core pedagogy, let's let the teachers adjust and customize their instruction to fit the group they're teaching at any given time... that's what they are trained to do, and I would argue strongly that it's also what puts the passion back into their purpose.

Let's remove subjects like music, art, health (and any other that is currently set aside as a supplemental class) and immerse these fine art elements into everything kids do in school. Why can't a music specialist teach alongside the classroom teacher providing musical expertise during math (can you think of a more natural way to add interest and fun to math class?) or social studies or language class? I have never understood why these subject areas are taught in isolation- it's an unnatural multiplication of entity beyond necessity.

Let's understand that to kids, life is simple. Kids just are. They experience everything in such visceral ways, and we take that away from them in school. So many teachers (perhaps adults in general) have become so wound up in the official world that we've lost our ability to see the real world through child's eyes... the world that should be amplified in schools through any means possible, and there are so many possibilities. Let's stop paying lip service to "meeting kids where they're at" and actually meet them where they're at; this wonderful place where everything is new and spectacular and worth looking at for hours as long as no adult comes by to hurry them along. Let's try to remember that, in the immortal words of Henry David Thoreau, "all change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every second." These words encapsulate perfectly the perspective of a child... the one that believes a miracle takes place every second, and I think, learning in general as perpetual inquiry and discovery.

Let's use technology as a value-added element of education, and not just for the sake of learning how to use technology. I'm of the opinion that technology should be omnipresent in our schools, not as an alternative to more traditional learning tools, but as a supplement to them. There will always be a mystique attached to reading a good old-fashioned book, and there will always be excitement created when kids build stuff in three dimensions using their hands and whatever can be found... but if we can show kids that e-readers and 3D digital representations are cool too, all the better.

Let's understand that teachers know best regarding where their students academic abilities and challenges lie. Given this understanding, it makes sense that assessment should be based on this insight. Teachers would appreciate more latitude to exercise the creative ways they know how to use formative assessment practices designed to develop understanding of those core curriculum principles I was referring to earlier. If we want our students to display an inquisitive and creative perspective, then we critically need opportunities to model that for them. We need to practice what we preach regarding our style of instruction and assessment to reflect a culture of inquiry and discovery for both teachers and students in our schools.

There are so many ways we can change to make education better; these suggestions are but a few. I've got ears for anyone, anytime who wants to add to this list. The only rule is that whatever the idea, it has to be seeded in the philosophy that less is more, and that the simplest and quickest path to wonderment in education is always the best. Once you set off on this path, the kids will take it from there.