REINVENTING THE WHEEL
The Canadians are joining the education reform movement spawned in the USA in a Canadian "race to the top" or is it the bottom? While the reasons up north echo the rationale for reform in the US - to create a global workforce, Canada is taking a different pedagogical direction to create change - or so it seems.
The key features of this new model are an emphasis on creativity, innovation and “digital literacies,” with more discussion of broad concepts and big ideas and less emphasis on factual knowledge.
Any teacher worth their pay is already encouraging students to be creative. And any teacher should be innovative to take advantage of new knowledge of how to teach more effectively. Teaching always involves concepts not merely rote learning of "facts"... And the basics are still reading, writing and math. So what's the real problem?
I don't think it's teachers per se but the need to reward good teaching and to weed out the bad apples. Peer teachers or principals know who the marginal ones are. They just need to suck it up and weed them out! I don't think this is a problem so much of bad teachers but parents who are AWOL from conception to birth and beyond.
As a grandfather to a 4 year old I see too many upwardly mobile parents more tethered to their I-phones than watching their kids. It is also beyond doubt that the primary indicators of school failure is economic status. If you come from the wrong side of the tracks, you are programmed for failure.
So all the talk about reforming education in the USA from 1980 on and now Canada - is classic avoidance behavior of the real problem - socio-economic inequality. Change that and you will do more to assure success in schools than any so-called education reform of K-12 schools.
Courses will be personalized to suit students’ “learning preferences.” Classes will be “student-centred,” and feature far less direct instruction and far more project and group work. Teachers will be expected to act as guides to “self-directed learners.” Technology will feature heavily in the classroom. Grades and testing will be downgraded. (Because who, after all, can measure “creativity”?)
Again, good teachers personalize instruction taking into account the multiple intelligences of each student and the need to be culturally appropriate with children that increasingly comes from different class, racial and gender oriented groups. But this is impossible to do with large class sizes!
Classes should be student centered not lecture centered. Again good teachers learn this stuff in their college classes and practice teaching. Project centered and group work are fine tools for expanding learning opportunities but they can't replace competent adult teachers any more than such could replace good parenting.
The love affair with technology and its presumed magic is so ubiquitous in modern society it makes one think all we need to design is a robot teacher machine. This of course is non-sensical. Testing is a bad word these days, especially high stakes testing. But students need to be continually assessed as to how they are doing.
This doesn't require treating them like so many widgets as if they were on an assembly line but it does require high standards of proficiency to be set and the old standards of grading be it non-grade centered or the usual A, B, C et al - have worked for ages and people understand it. So what's the problem?
Again, it comes back to valuing education, hiring and paying for good teachers, keeping class sizes small - 20 or below and treating teachers as professionals not people who need to be constantly monitored. But again, the first teacher is a parent. If parents do their job - then when kids go to school they will thrive - if not good luck!
All too often one sees parents not doing their job. Maybe parents ought to be licensed to give birth... Nope, too Orwellian. So we'll just have to muddle through and teachers will have to mitigate the collateral damage done to kids before they ever get to school hungry, tired, unwashed or upset.
A final note - the best reforms come from the bottom up, not the top down!
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