My office mate has directed my attention at a blog, "The Edurati Review: Where Policy Meets Pedagogy."
This particular post got me thinking.
It talks about the nouns and verbs of reform--how we teachers can turn the ideas (the nouns) into actual reform (the verbs) in our classroom. We dream up the nouns over the summer at workshops and conferences and then we are met with the status quo back in the classrooms where we teach, status quo so strong that it seems nearly impossible to do anything outside of it. One chapter of my dissertation is essentially about this, about how a dominant view of the purposes and practices of education within my mind, my students' minds, my school community's mind made it difficult to enact anything outside of that particular framework. That's what the Eduati Review talks about.
In my dissertation, I suggest that reform outside of the status quo is possible if we openly discuss the status quo with our colleagues and with our students and then try to understand who our students are and figure out what our students need as learners and make that our primary goal in our classrooms. If students know why we are doing something that may seem out of their previous experience, and if they know what the consequences are of doing things in classrooms as they've always been done, we can get them on board for different approaches.
Basically what I'm saying here is that my dissertation study taught me that my students can sometimes be a big obstacle to reform and change. They are used to a certain schooling experience and they have been taught to value that experience. They might not know what to do exactly with something that looks different, feels different. But they are smart enough to be engaged in a conversation about it, about them and who they are as learners, about their world and what it will ask of them. I find that far too often do we teachers engage our students in philosopical conversations about the whys of what we do in the classroom. For me, reform will need to start there (especially with the particular population of students I work with--the fairly disengaged, reluctant to read/write seriously high school senior who has been pretty disenchanted by three years of pretty tradiational language arts coursework that seems to value a literary analytic, make-them-literature-scholars goal.
The Edurati Review suggests something different (and I love this because it gives me a vision for my own work this year):
"Start with yourself and maybe a trusted colleague or Twitter friend. Stop thinking about what’s engaging, and look at what engages the students. What media are they using? What learning are they doing outside school? As Wagner and Torres said, ask which skills students turn off during the school day, that they could be using in your classroom. Build with inquiry in mind. Find which of Schlechty’s dimensions of engagement work and use them regularly. Read Sullo on what motivates these students. Design your classroom space so there’s a campfire, cave, and watering hole – areas for instruction, reflection, and social learning (via Bob Moje, VMDO architect). Stop measuring yourself against what good teaching looks like and consider what learning looks like. Students want to produce and collaborate; don’t stick to lessons and rules that get in the way. Create structures that promote inquiry and provide students with chances to show you what they learn. Facilitate students’ learning; don’t deliver content or teaching."
And finally, the Edurati Review calls for "class roots reform":
"Yes, we can reform education in our classrooms; no, we can’t scale it up on our own, but it takes individual action to cause change. Imagine if we held ourselves accountable for our classrooms and for working regularly and intentionally with peers engaged in the same work. Imagine class roots reform. On our teams, in our grades, in our schools, we have enough influence to make learning better for kids, and our students’ expectations of learning will change and follow them from class to class, influencing what they ask of others and making them less satisfied with the status quo, including the status quo of the work they do just to get by or to get an A."
I've always said that I can't necessarily change the whole system--too big, too entrenched in the way things have always done, too many people at policy/big money levels of decision making who are not educators and who are not familiar with the daily contours of classroom life. It's enough to make this reform-oriented educator hit her head against the wall, quit her job, and spend the rest of her life quilting or something. Instead, (because I do dearly love my job and I know I would wilt away if I quilted for a career), I focus on change for the better for my students in my classroom. And then I hope that it will spread in some little way. The Edurati reminds me that meaningful reform actually DOES start in this way. So bring it on!
And here's a direct question for F. Scott: how do we do this in our school? Of course you and I will both be working in our own ways in our own classrooms and conversations about this stuff will be rampant in our office and with the handful of colleagues who regularly stop by to chat it up with us and end up in some deep conversation about the whys of what we do. But can we be more systematic about it? Engage more voices on the faculty? Really think "class roots" here--it's about individuals making little changes. There are plenty of smart people on our school's faculty who would love to talk about this stuff. I have two possible ideas:
1) set up a wiki where we can post links to thought-provoking articles/news reports/blog postings and our own thoughts and questions about them. We invite our colleagues to join the conversation, post their own links, let the wiki take on its own identity. We figure out some way to offer professional development credit for people's work there.
2) monthly lunch time brown bag where we engage willing participants in conversation about big questions/issues related to our classrooms. We pull the topics from stuff like this blog posting in the Edurati Review. We take a paragraph or something, read it (or copy it and distribute it) and just talk. We invite anyone to attend--the more diverse opinions the better. We figure out a way to offer professional development credit for people who participate.
3) we do both of the above.
What do you think?
Time to do some curriculum mapping... (going out of town next week for the last adventure of the summer before school starts and I don't want to be stressed out about not having any plans made yet for the year).
M. Shelley
