Vicki Cobb, author of many children’s books about hands-on science, recently spoke at a children’s literature conference in Florida. She was disturbed to meet a new breed of teacher: teachers who had grown up in the era of high-stakes testing and scripted lessons. Too many thought that this is the way school was supposed to be, because it was all they had experienced.
She attributes the change to the takeover of education policy by non educators:
The business and government suits, who have hijacked educational policy in a top down approach, are not professional educators. Their knowledge of education comes primarily from what they themselves survived (endured?). Most do not know what good education looks like. Their idea of a well-ordered classroom is rows of desks with students quietly bent over a test. Now, the chickens are coming home to roost in the preparation of the next generation of Florida’s classroom teachers. Their professors tell me that they call them the “FCAT babies.” These young people are the pre-service teachers who have grown up in Florida’s test-taking climate. They have a “mother, may I?” permission-seeking approach to their own classroom behavior as teachers. They think test-taking and test prep is normal. They have seen nothing else. They are afraid to think for themselves.
As she posed questions to a group of students, she noticed that they answered quickly to her questions, not pausing to think. She sensed the test-prep culture, the reflexive search for the right answer. And that was not what she wanted to see.
She missed what she calls “the artist-teacher.” What is the “artist=teacher”? “An artist is someone who brings his or her own self-expression to an activity. An artist expresses personal, closely held views, thoughts, images and passions with such truth and clarity that others immediately connect with this revealed humanity. Thus the personal becomes the universal. Therein lies its power.”
Instead, teachers in Florida told her about scripted programs whose goal was to make sure that every teacher was on the same page at the same time teaching the same things. Scripted lessons are “turning teachers into automatons, when American education is crying out for the return of the artist-teacher. This is the teacher who takes one look at the textbooks and goes to the library to find much more powerful reading on the same subjects. This is the teacher who knows each student intimately and can write a poem for each one. This is the teacher who figures that good teaching trumps test prep and is not afraid for her kids’ test outcomes. This is the teacher who has the courage to justify what he’s doing and why he’s doing it to powers-that-be who are not fully equipped to evaluate creativity. It includes a lot of the “best teacher” awardees. This is the teacher who wants to spend more time creating powerful lessons and less time doing accountability paperwork. For the artist-teacher, teaching with autonomy, mastery and purpose is a subversive activity, much as art is subversive in a dictatorship.”
Our current educational culture, driven by No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core standards, is rewarding robotic behavior and punishing artist-teachers. In the current climate, good teaching is a subversive activity.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When the artist teacher and the authentic teacher have been replaced by the automaton proctor it will be but a seamless transition to the the cyborg hive.
I pity teachers today. I have lots of wonderful memories of “light bulb” moments where I got to see students’ excitement and curiosity in the classroom. I hope our current preoccupation with educational fascism will play out in disgust and failure before too much damage in done to all so young teachers will get joy of creating rewarding teachable moments in their career.
As an Art Teacher of over 25 years I have struggled with the task of quantifying what happens in my classroom, to the point of being forced to change my way of creating a learning environment in my classroom. My elementary students show great disappointment almost to the point of tears when they find out that we are reviewing vocabulary or taking yet another quiz or test over some standard from another subject area that I have had to adopt in order to produce data. My data is the expression of my students creativity-painting, drawing and the appreciation of fine art. I can see that I am contributing to those type of “FCAT babies,” or kids that think the only way to express them selves is through a test score. And this is the very thing that is going to force me out of education most likely sooner that I had planned.
Start planning your exit, developing an alternative career. Then, maybe you can leave after having a short period of time to teach the way you want to when they have no power to hurt you anymore. I used to love to substitute in art classes at my middle school. The lessons were well planned and hands on. The kids still learned foundational concepts, but through their projects. There were seldom any behavior problems. No one was required to sit in silence and everyone was engaged in what they were doing, and I often got to do the project too!
Yup I switched jobs for this reason. It is sad when the artist is taken out of the ART teacher.
If that’s alarming, look at what’s happening in China –and is probably just around the corner for us: “Charming” Robot Teacher” http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0604/c98649-8902151.html
It’s strange that the Chinese would call a lecturing robot with HUGE non-Asian eyes “charming.” Creepy is more like it.
You have to wonder how many corporate “reformers” in the US are working on this same kind of robot to replace teachers. Classes would probably be reduced to a huge amount of lectures and PowerPoints. Can’t see robots facilitating small groups and project work, let alone handling classroom management issues (and they do come up in college, too).
Whenever “reformers” try to eliminate teachers, they are sending the message that people and human interactions don’t matter as much as money. Communist China has become remarkably similar to neoliberal capitalist countries.
Maximize profits by minimizing human input.
This has long been a concern of mine. For the past two years every child graduating from high school has known nothing but NCLB and Race to the Top. Most new teachers have spent eight years or more in that environment and through their training are not exposed to anything other than standards based education. Young professional educators are completely dependent on detailed class pacing guides aligned with current standards. They have never had the opportunity to participate in or observe authentic education. Even if we turn the ship of public education onto a more pedagogically correct course, it is going to take a long time to heal the classroom culture.
My favorite teachers in school or the one’s that I remember a lot of their instruction, were the one’s that got me out of the book and worrying about a grade. They had me focus on actual learning. Out of the box thinking and teaching. they were awesome!
These developments, to me, are a horror beyond imagination. With all those who know better, just how is this allowed to happen? And just what kind of persons are going to want to go into teaching in the future? And then where will we be? I like to think that sanity will eventually prevail, but with all the craziness going on in other areas, I’m not sure it will.
While I appreciate the sentiments, the larger point is not so much about artistry as it is about the degree to which teachers are free to exercise judgment based on their experience and free to bring into the life of students attention to affinities for learning.
I say this as a longtime worker in arts education The concept of “artist-teacher” is more complex than is represented in this post.
That said, the idea that teachers cannot be trusted has been carefully cultivated by many critics who think teachers are too eager to indoctrinate students and want schools to be institutions of authority…of a preferred kind…strictly academic. And with the CCSS embedded in federal policies, standardized, with grade level instruction or else, and so on. The distrust of teachers is evident in the strictest forms of micromanagement, constant survellience for unauthorized and potentially subversive activity,. This is the ethos of the McCarthy era. The FCAT babies will continue to be produced until there is a counter-revolutionary movement strong enough to overturn what Diane has aptly called the reign of error.
“The business and government suits, who have hijacked educational policy in a top down approach, are not professional educators. ”
While I certainly agree with that, I do think there are a lot of parents who are also not educators and would absolutely endorse the narrow approach she describes. It’s true in my public school. My son’s 5th grade math teacher is an example. Perfectly nice and seemingly decent person, but her approach was to have them do online math problems as homework- 4 days a week. My son would dutifully plow through them and he got faster and faster. She had the highest “growth” score in the 5th grade section if I am reading the elaborate school report card I got that year correctly. Many parents I know approved of this 100%- she was considered “tough” and “getting the job done”. It was last year, so under the state’s “old” testing regime so I don’t know if her approach will “work” with the Common Core test.
It isn’t just “business and government suits” who use test scores and ranking as a proxy for “good”. If we really had this public consensus on deep analysis and critical thinking would Top Ten lists be so wildly popular? Lots of people use ranking and scores as proxy for “best”. It’s easy, right? It’s one number and it APPEARS determinative and conclusive. That’s hugely appealing.
Very true, and more of a problem that we acknowledge.
The above comments are VERY insightful. When human beings are relegated to the status of sponges, absorbing that which government, politicians promote as “truths’ and educators are relegated to the status of “promoters of that government agenda”, any vestige of democratic governance has been lost.
Yesterday, June 6th, the 71st anniversary of D day in WWII is a reminder of what happens to a country which allows autocracy, tyrannical political domination to supplant humanitarian idealism.
Our plutocracy, that which we devolved to, with the propagandizing by corporate media, the supposed bastion of our democratic idealism, has made the robotizing of our children a prime objective. Widgets to produce the ever increasing demands of those in power to supply their ever increasing monetary wealth.
Our real wealth in its many forms has been superseded by the rush for ever increasing monetary profits, the false god in which they worship.
Money has of course only the value which we give it. Real wealth in all ITS aspects is what makes us human.
The Roman empire deteriorated when people became slaves to their slaves although they would never have guessed nor admitted that that was what was happening. Our mechanistic mindset has made us slaves to that kind of technology and we are finding out the hard way that this is not the way to go. The hacking into our best kept “secrets” is only one way, perhaps only the beginning of that truism.
Anthropologists have told us that when an “animal” becomes too specialized it is in great danger of becoming extinct but who listens to our academic minds now?
I started teaching Art in NYC in 2007 when the first generation of NCLB kids were hitting middle school. My first job was in a school where 8th graders were dropping out and 7th graders were skipping and acting out.
I was hired because I had a background in comics and graffiti art and I was charged with getting kids engaged so they stay in school. But at the same time the school was feeling every pressure to lift test scores, under threat of closure and teachers losing their positions. And there were cuts every year I was there.
Today kids hate testing more than ever, and teachers are now threatened by statute to raise scores or face dismissal. It’s worse than ever in the classroom as politicians double down. My suggestion to all teachers is to document superior alternatives in the classroom and get active. Only the Chicago model of electorally challenging the status quo will work and have no doubt this is class war and austerity invading all of public education.
Sixteen years ago, I was the teacher that is missing today. My work went around the nation as the LRDC (uni. of Pittsburgh) took the work of the six teachers out of 20, thousand, who met the Pew’s national standards research objectives in unique ways.
Unique educators are not wanted. I was the NYState English Council’s (Educator of Excellence) in 1998, only months before charges of incompetence were put forth, meaning yrs on a rubber room before a kangaroo court hearing, in which the principal would ‘document’ how I did not follow the mandates.
They couldn’t remove teachers like me, fast enough.
They killed the profession.
If they did this to doctors, people would die. But the privatized the insurance so our citizens do not have access to good health care, and have to choose between food, rent and a doctor’s visit.
They can’t do this to lawyers, because… well they know their rights and how to fight.
Gordon is right… this is the end of our empire.
Do you suppose this might also involve flawed teacher preparation program and the quality of mentoring on entering public schools?
You mean like TfA and RELAY and other such programs? Yes, absolutely they’ve contributed to the problem.
Now, here you have a real point. Ed degrees are a joke in many places.
Whenever a formally trained educator makes this claim, I’m inclined to believe that includes their own degrees, which then makes me question their competence. No doubt, corporate “reformers” who are trying to dismantle Teacher Education love to hear that, as does Teach for America (TFA), since their aim is for “One Day, Every Child” to have a 5 week trained TFAer.
What we all need to understand is that teaching to a large extent is a personal relationship between teachers, children and other adults (especially authors of children’s books, who I think of as my co-teachers). I try to share my enthusiasm for learning with students I encounter from pre-K to graduate school. Only when students have a need to know or a desire to learn will real leaning happen. Excellent teachers have a passion for teaching and learning. No one can make this into a script to be used by hundreds or thousands of teachers. Like many other people who responded to this post, I taught at a different time–a time when teachers were nurtured and encouraged to try things. I am so fortunate that I took advantage of this opportunity.
I think the opposite is true. Many state colleges and universities send some of the best prepared teachers in public education; yet these are the very institutions that are now under attack. While there may be some room for improvement in some schools, the problem today is that there is little to entice young people to enter this challenging career. Young people will be less likely to accept a position with little job security and eroding benefits. The profession that used to be held in some level of esteem is being deprofessionalized as blame and scapegoating are not career builders. Our practice of ad nauseum testing has sucked the life out of the classroom and taken the joy out of teaching with the narrowing of the curriculum. In fact, the testing may be a deliberate attempt to make public schools unbearable for students and teachers. Privatizers have widened the net of abuse to include institutions of higher education in order to deliver yet another blow to public schools.
John Ruskin wrote (probably one of his most famous quotes) in “Stones of Venice;” You must either make a tool of the creature or a man of him. You cannot make both.” This part of the book focuses on the invention of the vaulted arch and how it changed architecture and helped usher in the Renaissance. Here is the whole paragraph in which the quote was found:
You must either make a tool of the creature or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last { a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them.
What the vaulted arch did was allow the human to be human in the work place and not just another tool, it allowed the mason and the stone cutter to interject a bit of whimsy, a bit of their own personality and creative vision. The context of this paragraph was the rounded arch and vaulted arch. The rounded arch required precision, it could only be made one way and one size or one proportion. The vaulted arch had infinite possibilities and gave the the worker the opportunity to experiment and vary the dimensions. The worker could work as an individual, as a human. But the point Ruskin makes is not just true for art and architecture.
What standardized tests and the “high standards” movement does is first make a tool of the teacher who then makes a tool of the student. As with the stone cutters and masons who made the rounded arch everything is done to a “template” that envisions one way of doing things. This movement has behind it business leaders who are looking for trained employees to do what they are told and follow the script without question. Students will go into the work force and be given jobs that treats them like tools and does not let them be fully human until they are home by their hearth and fireside. This is not only not in the best interest of the student it is not in the best long-term interest of the employer or of business. It stifles the creativity that made America the creative and innovative society it has become. Giving students and teachers the freedom to be human and creative means giving them the freedom to make mistakes, to learn from mistakes, to discover things that have never before been imagined from mistakes. We are being taught to fear failure and mistakes when in fact most progress was birthed by mistakes or if not mistakes by a process of trial and error that involves many missteps. But the high stakes tests and their consequences encourage teacher and student to fear making mistakes. The purpose of on the job training is to make a better employee, the purpose of education is to make a better human being and to help students discover what it means to be fully human.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
Beautifully said.
Great comments. I would add that it’s not just new and younger teachers who don’t know anything else. It’s the students too. Let’s not leave them out of this. While the question “Is this in the test?” has been around for centuries, it is now the only question that gets asked. If students are demanding standardized testing and teaching to the test and more college prep, not less, what is the teacher to say in reply to justify the old (and better) ways?
“Giving students and teachers the freedom to be human and creative means giving them the freedom to make mistakes, to learn from mistakes, to discover things that have never before been imagined from mistakes.”
I love this quote! Even though I have encouraged my students to use their mistakes as necessary stepping stones in the learning process, there are implications to viewing mistakes this way that go far beyond the purview of a classroom. I can let go of those past faux pas that continue to haunt me and focus on how they have led me to a better way of handling so many of life’s challenges. I can look to the past and not judge myself quite so harshly. Getting hung up on our past missteps can make us very timid of moving beyond those mistakes. Life, not just education, is a learning process.
Love what Vicki Cobb said about artist teacher mix. However she left out an important point. The artist draws on an educated set of experiences to bring new questions to the world. Artists must understand how to express an idea. Teachers must understand how to generate social,emotional, and intellectual tools for kids so they can become skilled at asking questions about ideas.
I am an English Teacher (ELA nowadays) and one thing I try to encourage my students to understand is the importance of having a vocabulary that enables you to express your ideas clearly. I use music as an example. If you have all this music floating around in your head, but you do not know the musical vocabulary, cannot manage the musical alphabet, if you do not know the notes and how to read and write them, if you do not know the musical notation, if you do not know the sounds of the various instruments you cannot take the music you hear in your head and give it to musicians to play. Ideas are the same way. Most students have lots of ideas in their heads, but they do not have the words to express them. Horace said, “Master the stuff and the words will freely follow.” Without the knowledge and the vocabulary we are not able to think and write freely. I suggest to my students that luck may get you over the goal line, but skill gets you close enough to get lucky.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
“…luck may get you over the goal line, but skill gets you close enough to get lucky.”
KTA got me started on jotting down quotes that intrigued me. You have scored two in one day!
I like that label: artist-teacher. We are the ones who still create our boards instead of buying the stuff from a teacher store. We are the ones who go all out on topics of interest like Rainforest instead of just prepping for tests. We are the ones who actually teach till the last day of school because every moment counts. Forget the tests. I would rather spend test money on better resources and facilities.
I was one of those artist teachers for thirty years, and back in the 1980s, the move to turn teachers into robots had its start—something I resisted to the day I retired in 2005.
I take issue with the finger being pointed at new and younger teachers. There’s been much anecdotal experiences and inference thrown around about this group and I can’t say that my experience is coherent with that. My student teachers have been eager to shuck the burden of broad and shallow test-aligned content standards BECAUSE they hated it as students themselves.
It could very well be that we’re having an issue with younger teachers because the older generation always takes issue with the way the younger generation does things. There’s a Socrates/Plato quote of dubious origin concerning this very same phenomenon.
Perhaps so. But I was recently at a committee meeting of my union’s “Less Testing More Learning” campaign, where a young teacher expressed her disagreement with our premise. She stated that “our job is to prepare them to pass these tests”. When pressed, she wanted to know how else teachers and/or others could tell we were doing our jobs.
Christina, I was a new teacher in 1966. After 40 years of experience talking with veteran and novice PRACTITIONERS, I too have noticed a real lack of information about what works, what learning looks like and how performance evaluation should work for both students an teaches.
In the last decade where I had student teachers in my room, their ignorance about what worked in the past, and what is proven to work, has left me astonished.
The metaphor that works is this: what if the young interns at the hospitals were in the dark about the REAL, AUTHENTIC, GENUINE studies and research.
In education, the real results of such genuine research is LOST, and disregarded as the NEW THING, the magic elixir (no evidence required as Willingham says) trends! http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
In fact, at this blog, I once described the lesson plan format I used from the day I began teaching, and was called out my a new teacher, as foolish for using this old method to plan.
Yeah. Stating the learning objectives, listing the materials, and the activities a swell as the follow up,is old fashioned.
I am tired, Christine, of the chatter, the blather, the nonsense that passes as knowledge of how learning is acquired by the human brain..
I am exhausted by the endless rationals from the Joe Nathans, who either by intention and design, or honest belief offer opinion as fact to appear knowledgeable on a subject which is purely subjective to them.
I am glad there is a blog like this, but reading it often makes me very, very sad.
Susan, as a person who began working in an urban public school in 1970, I share your frustration about the lack of information people have about research on “what works”. Apparently we read at least some research differently.
The work that we do is based on considerable research about the value for young people from low income students in fields, who gain from
* early childhood programs that work with both students and families
* combining classroom work and community service to help more young people develop both skills needed and the belief that they can help produce a better work
* small schools with a theme
* earning college credit while still in high school
Some of the research I’ve learned from is summarized in two great documents by the American Youth Policy Forum:
Click to access comp02.pdf
IN 1990. a small school with a theme opened on York ave and 77th.
The theme was the humanities, and the school touted itself as a place for ‘gifted education… the kind of learning that works.
And it did. The small staff gathered from all over the city, all expert practitioners, included young and veteran teachers who knew their content and the best educational practices. In a year Manhattan took notice; we were that number one middle school in 3 years , as our ‘kids’ moved on to the top high schools, and scored at the top of city tests ,including the new ELA which ‘tested’ writing, (my kids were 3rd in the state).
We worked as a team through the 3 grades and everyone of us KNEW every single child who walked those halls and sat in our classes.
Yeah it worked.
It was a public school.
But there were no hedge funds or PACS to promote public education and the media was silent about the success, jumping on the more dramatic stories that became the national narrative… how our schools were falling… as the invented failure IN THE NAME OF CHOICE.
I here all you say, so eruditely and with such ernest beliefs.
You are simply on the wrong page here, because we actually have a long memory and some very real information about what happened, what is the reality now, and what will happen to democracy and our people if this conspiracy to end public education is permitted to persuade people that charters offer choice.
Maybe they do offer some kids a choice — in today’s destitute school systems, because the money is pouring in there, but there is no OVERSIGHT, the corruption is rife, and the reality of who can and who cannot get an education in these ‘choice’ schools, cannot be denied.
It is fascinating, always, to read arguments that cherry pick facts, and appear lucid and sincere but present fallacious a the root.
Susan, “the media” is fickle. There was huge attention given to District 4 in East Harlem. I’m sorry that more attention was not given to the school that you worked in. Sounds like a great place.
We’re working closely with several unions to promote teacher led district public schools, including startup funds. The teachers involved hope this will help give new opportunities for teachers in existing and potentially newly created district schools.
I am all for seeking solutions. good luck… you obviously believe what you say.
My point is, no matter what really works, nothing is passed on… some new idea or reform comes along, and like the medical profession, the teacher- practitioner is mandated to do it, and then, these days, blamed if it fails… but the reality is that there are forces at work that ensure that few good PUBLIC school get to demonstrate what succeeds…someone is always inventing the wheel.
My school was famous. I was famous, NYSEC Educator of Excellence… which is neither here nor there.. Heard my name and the that of my school on the cross-town bus!!!
What matters is this ‘experiment with small neighborhood public schools WORKED… and was dismantled…the teachers scattered, the whole thing, disappeared… including the fact that Harvard was involved and this was the cohort in NYC for the huge Pew nationals standards research…which was touted in The American Educator.., Nothing, NADA remains but a memory.
The breakup was intentional, as the sorrows filled with tests, and Duncan prepared to go on his rant, thanks to all children left behind … the Bush agenda, engineered by Koch, Broad and friends.
So maybe what you are seeing is the next ‘wheel’ but one thing is for sure, the poverty stricken millions of children will never get the education they need, because the oligarchs cannot have an educated citizenry and still create a servile class.
oops… my cynicism is showing…but as I am in my seventh decade, and have been watching this show since I went to great FREE, schools in the forties, fifties and sixties, and taught in them from the sites though the year 2000, I see the reality.
So an impertinent comment from one ostensibly young teacher means that all if not most young teachers feel the same way?
I haven’t encountered anyone from TFA. All of my student teachers have come through the university and have a solid grounding in research based practices consistent with the teaching practices we all value here.
Maybe I’m just living in a lucky little pocket of freedom where I’m not seeing quite the same pressure to teach to the test.
I’m not trying to substitute anecdote for data. This one young teacher, with 2 years of classroom experience, has accepted the premise that teachers are only “effective” if students do “well” on standardized tests. All serious research demonstrates this is false. It is alarming to me that this young teacher accepts it as true.
I get up every day at 5 AM to grind out a few words on whatever novel I am working on. I’m currently on my fifth, a YA retelling of “Macbeth”. How does this daily discipline inform my teaching? It means that I am suffering through the very writing problems my students are dealing with, or I’ve been through them and emerged the other side. Being an active fiction writer means I know how hard writing is. I know what it means to face writer’s block, to get terrified by an empty page, to not know where to take a story. It means I can teach my craft with authority.
I am a better teacher because I am an artist. At times I even pull up my own writing and use it as part of a lesson — not as a “see how awesome I am” thing but as an example of how to express oneself. I’m often surprised to meet English teachers who aren’t active writers, or even active readers! I think we must challenge ourselves with our craft in order to have authority with it.
Loved you comment. As a playwright who taught writing, all I did was show children what I knew about the writing process…including the empty page. It is ironic that you mention this here and now, as I am now a writer at a news site, and working on creating pieces for a blog of my own, and I know how hard it is to do the work… to get the words down wondering if anyone will read it, or if it is ‘good enough.”
I remembered, as I read your comment, a lesson that I did with 13 year old NYC kids, on finding their voice and getting their thoughts down. My students had to write a letter to me, each week, about the book they were reading. Of course, this allowed me to monitor their private reading, but I was clear about the letter as a tool to access their own ‘take-away,’ and to promote their writing. The students were required to make personal connections to what they read, or to offer some insight that they recognized form our discussions of writing… about irony,or lyrical language, etc.
I offered some pre-writing advice to help them find something to pursue in a letter, some connection. One boy, the next day, told the class, “it really worked. I had no idea what I was going to say, and I did what Mrs S. suggested.”
Here’s the thing… as John Oliver might say… we do not ‘teach’ anything. This national conversation about teaching is the one promoted by Duncan and clones.
Attending years of seminars, when I was the NYC cohort for the REAL national standards research 1996), (which was called THE Eight,PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING) I learned to talk about LEARNING, what it looks like, and how, as the mentor in the room I “enabled” and “facilitated” it.
We only show students what we know. I know how to write, and paint, and take photos and how to listen, anyhow to analyze and compare, and how to work hard, and how to trust myself.
MY ‘kids’ followed my example.
I also was — as the principles of learning demanded — highly competent in my professional knowledge and in the content knowledge. I shared what I knew about writing.
Reblogged this on your summons echoes true and commented:
This is what frustrated me about my time in public school. While I was blessed to work with creative administrators who supported my sometimes crazy ideas, I saw other districts where teachers were required to stay on the same page on the same day with little regard for the human beings the district was charged with educating. I saw so much giftedness and creativity in my brief time in the Syracuse City District, and I am concerned that that will be lost in the coming generations with the test prep mindset that is currently fostered. Encourage exploration of the unique creativity of those around you – not just children. We will be a richer society through supporting the artists within.
Darn it, I cannot find it now, but I searched for what an artist teacher was, and it looks like CC supporters are pushing their own brand of artist teacher. Slick.
Reblogged this on Creative Delaware and commented:
It is sad when the Artist is taken out of the ART teacher.