Jan 27 2008
Oakes and Lipton: Chapter 3 – Philosophy and Politics
As I read this chapter, I think back to college and my Educational Psychology class. It always disturbed me that we couldn’t agree on a road map for educating our children. I wonder if other countries ponder back and forth about how to teach their children. Then as I started teaching, I realized that there would be times that I wouldn’t agree about something with other teachers that I work with. I guess that I was lucky because the first principal that I worked for was a true Instructional Leader. She knew how to help the faculty collaborate and grow stronger in our instructional practice. She didn’t allow any teacher to pass on the resonsibility of educating ANY children to anyone else. Special Ed? ESOL? Non-engaged parents? It didn’t matter. It was my job to educate my students. And she knew that what might work for one child, might not be a strength in learning for another. She allowed us the freedon to use a variety of strategies. But, she also held us accountable for those strategies as well. At the end of each semester, she wanted us to write down which five children were showing excellent progress and what we were doing with them. She also wanted to know which five students were still struggling and what strategies had we tried with those. That helped me see that some of these students did learn differently. I appreciated how she held us accountable for the education of our children and still gave us a bit of freedom about how we did it. Little did I know that those kind of instructional leaders are few and far between. I have been teaching nine years since that time, and I haven’t had a good instructional leader since.
As I look at how we as a nation have swung back and forth on a pendulum, I wonder how many of those times, were teachers or administrators passing the responsibility of educating children on to someone else. That’s kind of how I felt when I read about all the different eras where the focus was on skills instruction and not on the process or teaching children how to think. I think that during those times, people feel like it is okay just to give the “basics” because their parents can give them the extra. The reality of it is that they don’t. And if one of these kids that I’m teaching is a teacher for my child, I don’t just want them teaching them the basics. I want them thinking like Benjamin Franklin. I want them to impart on my child the exposure to think through any situation and come up with possible ways of solving them. I recently heard a teacher telling another colleague that we should be doing timed math tests. She said, they worked for me so why shouldn’t they work for our kids today. I understand where she is coming from in that the kids get plenty of repeated practice in an area that is important for further instruction. However, I wonder, if those same kids were given math problem solving, would they be successful? I’m not so sure. Not if all we are doing is giving them the rote practice. We have to teach them how to think. I don’t know what challenges the children will face in the future. If I don’t teach them how to think and reason through the process of problem-solving, I may prevent them from faces those challenges prepared. I read a lot of ideas and philosophies in this chapter that I still hear today. It is scary to think that the philosophy that a teacher has may determine the success of that child’s educational future…
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Your comments made me think about several things:
If we follow a road map for education, I have a fear that it will lead to cookie cutter, direct instruction teaching which will allow us even less freedom to be progressive educators than we already have. My gut tells me that other countries do not think about how to educate their children because they do not educate all of their children. The principal you described sounds great although I have some concerns about teachers being held solely accountable for educating their own students. My concern is that if accountability rests on our shoulders then inevitably performance ratings and salary will be tied to our students performance in the classroom. We face many challenges in the classroom which impact our students ability or inability to succeed. I think higher ups are very quick to point the finger and that is why the pendulum continues to swing for special education service delivery from self contained to inclusion with regular ed and back again with no real answer in sight. I do know that it is tough to get teachers who willingly teach inclusion because of the accountability. Many of the good teachers at our school are burned out from going the extra mile and they get stuck doing it because they are so good at it. What will happen in 2014 when 100% of our kids will have to pass the CRCT? Who will be accountable then for the special education kids? We have already established that it is unrealistic to expect kids to pass the same test on the same day given in the same way so why will they be asked to do just that in a short 5 years and who will be held accountable when they do not? I am just leary of putting all the accountability on the shoulders of teachers but the track record shows that is exactly where it will fall.