A diagnosis. We’ll start with a check-up on the state of things in your day-to-day teaching practice. How many of the following situations feel familiar to you?
My students are often disengaged. In any class, the same students answer questions, while the others are often passive and disinterested. I have to push energetically to get the class to have forward momentum.
By and large, students don’t seem to be retaining what they have learned. When reviewing for a semester exam, for instance, I am often surprised at how little even my successful students remember about material we covered only a few months earlier.
I get caught up in power struggles with unsuccessful students about their behavior. They can be disruptive, sullen, resistant, even disrespectful. Struggling students rarely come in for additional help outside of class, and their parents don’t show up for conferences.
I find myself caught up in struggles with successful students over their grades. They care too much about how many points they are getting. They sometimes seem to be gaming the system to get better grades.
There is simply too much curriculum to cover in the amount of time I have. If I move through the curriculum fast enough to cover all the material that will be on the exam (the scope of which is not in my control), I inevitably end up leaving too many students in my wake. There isn’t enough time to slow down and investigate topics that students are interested in either. We always have to superficially rush through a lot of curriculum at the end of the semester to “prepare” for the final exam. I feel like we’re on a conveyor belt that is going much too fast. There is little time for creativity or play.
There is intense pressure to prepare students for standardized tests, as required by the state. These tests chew up a significant amount of class time, and I have to force students to take them seriously.
I feel beset by external demands on my time and by serious constraints on how I do my job. There is a gap between who I want to be as a teacher — the reason I went into teaching in the first place — and what I am forced to do in my classroom.
So, how did you do? If more than a few of these seem to describe your experience as a teacher, you are not alone. The reason these issues are so widespread is that they all spring from the same ubiquitous source, the fundamental philosophy of education as it is practiced in most schools today. That philosophy, although rarely, if ever, explicitly discussed, is based on a misguided and deeply counterproductive premise. It is a house that has been built on the wrong foundation.
How can we tell what true foundational philosophy of school currently is? The answer lies in how success is measured. The result of decades of school reform is this: the success of a school is measured by standardized test scores. And what do those tests measure? How well the students have mastered a broad and rigorous set of standards.
For all practical purposes, there are no other yardsticks for assessing whether a school is working well or not.
And this, in turn, reveals the true current purpose of school, whether or not it is stated explicitly: to have every student master all the standards.
Let’s call this the Curriculum Transfer Model of school. No matter what we would like to believe about what we teachers are doing in the classroom, this is the functional reality in which we operate.
To solve the problems found in so many classrooms, this approach must be replaced. But first we need to see it clearly, with fresh eyes.
