A friend posted this with a question to her teacher friends about what they thought. I thought Id share it, along with my response. Like her, I have a lot of teacher friends on my list (I know that shocks everyone, really!). What do you folks think? Either about the quote or about my response to her and to the quote? ******************************* My response: I think that left to their own devices, good teachers would do this. I think many of us try to do this within the constraints of the materials that we are told to use, the standards we are told to teach, and the tests that we are told everyone has to take and pass. Until theres a fundamental change in education and more power is put into the hands of the people who spend the time with the students in the classroom, students will continue to struggle with material that isnt presented to them in a way that allows them to succeed because classroom teachers have 25 kids in a room and often have no extra help from parent volunteers and very few have aides so they have to present the material to the group as a whole and hope that the folks who cant adapt to that style can get it. With that said, I see a lot of flipped classroom things occurring, with technology making it easier for classroom teachers to flip the classroom. That style puts more control into the hands of the kids and I think it makes the material more accessible for all students. However, that doesnt happen in all schools and in all classrooms, due to a lack of resources or a lack of knowledge on the teachers parts (and administration). A flipped classroom is still only a band-aid until the whole system is revamped and the standardized tests start to recognize that we should be measuring progress and real learning, not just the ability to fill in the right bubble on a scan-tron form. No Child Left Behind is the root cause of a lot of the problems that I see in education and how students are taught but at this point, the problem goes deeper because an entire generation of teachers has been taught to be teachers in a climate where NCLB is Big Brother. Even the removal of NCLB would be only the first step now -- teachers would have to have instruction and training in how to be mentors again, rather than slaves to the test. Like I said -- good teachers already try to teach in ways that allow their students to learn. But even the best teachers never once forget that Big Brother is waiting, and students, teachers, and schools are all judged based on what Big Brother says after the kids jump through the hoops.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 17:49:23 +0000
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