I want to go, today, where I’d planned to go on Wednesday. We have been exploring best practices, and my conclusion is that most teachers have a definition of the term that serves them well. To some it is a file cabinet with proven practices that they can call on. For others, it is teaching techniques and classroom procedures that help them do their jobs (accomplish their instructional goals), regardless of whether they came from an institution approved source or out of their own imaginations.
I guess that my concern is with a belief that teaching and learning happens in a laboratory, where factors can be controlled. Learning is messy, and the belief that it can be accomplished exclusively by scientifically tested and institutionally approved techniques is naive at best, and at worst, it is arrogant. Certainly there is an important place for research. However, as I said earlier, I believe that teaching is a calling, not a practice.
What I want to ask you to explore today, however, is what we might call best field. On Wednesday, I talked about the baseball and football practice that I engaged in when I was in my teens. As I mentioned, I practiced (and played) these sports on fields that were specifically laid out in a prescribed way within the context of rules and goals that have evolved through the decades. We wanted a game that was fun to watch, so the field and the rules have changed over the years to make the game more enjoyable for the spectators (and the players).
So, best practice aside, how would you change the field and the rules of the game of education? If education is to improve in its task (to prepare children for their future), how would you change the rules?
You have 45 minutes.
Image Citation:
Hobbes, Calvin. “Bernie Williams at Bat.” Hobbes8Calvin’s Photostream. 23 Aug 2006. 15 Sep 2006 <http://flickr.com/photos/smaira/223379695/>.
technorati tags:bestpractice, education, warlick, newstory
Blogged with Flock
Dave,
what you ask for couldn’t be answered in 45 minutes 😉 There where generations of educators and professional thinkers looking for the right way.
But as you said beside the “best practice” – i would like to give you my favorite two lines inside this “field”.
The first is the observation that the need for knowledge changed inside the last XX years. And I think this is comparable in all countries – if you as student have to be “well educated” you schould hav a base of knowledge – shure – a stable ground you can refer – but you should have more than ever before – a good strategy – to have a look for new information – to integrate this new informations into your knowlegde – to bind or link this new assets into something new and finally to be enabled to express what you found and linked and constructed. So you may think that this looks like a bottlewarmer of the old skills – maybe this is foundet on my observations of how the old fields at schools often are. Many schools i have seen show a lot of Problems declairing those thoughts into theyr own and twist it as theyr directives.
This leads to the second line I want to draw, the peoples seem mainly helpless. So it is not done by equipping all the schools one time without giving good thoughts ahand how to start going the new ways of entering the new society of mind. I believe devoutly this is not a question of generation, gender or age. Perhaps it tangues mor the question of fantasy, how to embed the “new field” and the “new game” into the real life. It my be also a question of justification in the daily practice. So beeing deply inside of your metaphor – you as a teacher are a co-player beside your students – but without tournament and opponent. But you have a lot of refugees who all declaire theyr own set of rules – f. I. govermentenal and administrational ones, the parents, the collegues … everybody has it’s own understanding of how the game should be nice and effective …
so far … perhaps a little bit to pathetique — but I’ve got a lot of showstoppers in mind – practically stopping the game and therefore best practices should make shure: You as educator are allowed to play the game because it is authentic when you play this with your students and – what you deeply feel inside is good to do with them – you should do because ….
Andreas
David:
This post really called to me, having been a coach for many years, the playing field created a structure for us to play and work in. The boundaries were known, but the field was of a size and the rules were flexible enough to allow for individual and/or team innovation. I think this is where I am at with my perspective on education and the use of technology in the educational process. In athletics, you have a pre-season conditioning and training process and then you start playing games against others. From the results of those games you receive feedback on skills that need greater emphasis in your future practice sessions (classes). This cycle of skill acquisition and refinement may not be ‘educationally’ perfect, but it does provide students the opportunity to perfect basic skills to provide a foundation for later learning. The issue then becomes, how do we simulate the ‘game’ to provide real world feed back to the students to assist them in seeing the skills they need to improve. To me… blogging is that game, it is a public demonstration of student skill and performance. From the feed back they receive they can choose to refine the skills others have commented on from their posts.
David,
At least according to my reading, you make it sound as if teaching is all art and no science. Well, I couldn’t disagree more. As teachers we know some things. Most students learn best when they are engaged in their learning. Students need some structure, but too much structure may not be good, either. I think that Kyle raises some very good points. Teaching is not an absolute either way – it’s a combination of art and science.
Andrew Pass
http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.html
I’m wondering if the field and rules match at all in a majority of our classrooms anymore. The “field” has changed drastically over the past, let’s say, 10 years hasn’t it? And yet, many of our teachers and administrators are still trying to play by the old rules. The “field” now contains much more knowledge about the brain and learning, and many more tools for information,collaboration, creativity, communication, innovation. Playing on that field are teachers who are still “pitching” the same lessons and using the same lessons that they have for many years. But the other players, the students, are really into almost a whole different game than the teachers are.
So, I don’t know what the best answer to your question is but I think we need to recognize that many of our teachers, even our newest teachers in the classrooms today, are still working from the role models of their own school years who were trained in the 20th century – they’re still playing by old rules. Our most innovative teachers are playing by and developing new rules all the time and seem to be those who invest in constructing new knowledge through their own personal professional development and work and by being good kid watchers and adjusting to the needs of the individuals.
I don’t know if teaching is an art or a science anymore, but I do know that if teaching doesn’t continually evolve, if we don’t start using 21st century rules, we won’t be preparing our students for the future as well as we need to.
I agree with a lot of what Diane said but as for changing the rulesmy immediate thought has to do with “who is eligible to play.” Wiki’s and blogs by there very nature change the players list. On a local level I think that some of our assumtions regarding age based classrooms need to be challenged. Sports have always relied on ability and intrest based groupings within certain boundaries …hmmm.
You write: “Best practice aside, how would you change the field and the rules of the game of education? If education is to improve in its task (to prepare children for their future), how would you change the rules?”
Remove the teachers, close the schools, shut down the school boards.
Then, given that every child is in his or her own home or community (or perhaps at the parent’s workplace, because ‘shool as babysitter’ is no longer in play), ask, how best to enable that child to learn.
We would not:
– remove them from society
– imprison them in a hostile environment
– force-feed them sanitized pablum as content
We would begin to look at their media consumption – all their media, not just that between 9 to 3, and we would look at their role models and mentors. We would need to articulate to adults the idea that they are all teachers now, and so that there is a need for them to document what they do and to talk about it with the young.
Free and widely available learning resources, open and accessible to all, would become instantly available. This would turn out to be significantly cheaper and more effective than textbooks, even if we had to subsidize internet access. Interestingly, students would have more choice of learning materials (though this would bother some groups, who want learning to be a form of propaganda).
Young people would be expected to report to various adults – their parents, first of all, but also their mentors or guardians, other relatives, a community or village counsellor, a priest or pastor, and others. They would do this mostly online (meetings with adults would always be in public places) using their portable internet access. They would be expected to participate in society from a very young age; at all stages of life their contributions would be meaningful.
The age-old separation between learning and life, in other words, would be ended. The employment of education as a means of crowd control and indoctrination, as a form of disempowerment, would be ended.