Educational Innovation as a Metaphor

"They want teachers who are 'yes' men, teachers who will carry our the mandated curriculum. Not visionaries." So, before I continue, is anyone else feeling anger pulse through their veins? Is anyone else wishing that they had the power to make their own school and higher their own visionaries? I know I am somewhere on that train of thought... wondering what fool would buy into this. 

Let's run with this idiom: "train of thought". 

What is the point of education if it can't gain power? If the students that spend their days sitting in these classrooms, swallowing whatever information is force fed to them without any time to mentally "chew" and to process what they've heard, how can this student gain power? I mean, we don't put rocket fuel in our cars assuming that its going to power it in a better way. It won't work. A rocket is a rocket while a car is a car. Students are students in the same way. 

If we as teachers are going to allow administrators to demand that things be done in a certain way, but then also watch as they demand that we  produce on a greater and greater level that is based less and less on our actual improvement in practices and techniques,  then we are allowing them to fuel our cars with jet fuel. Its not going to work. This is not how people learn. When we get into college we are expected to take everything on the fly. Experience is our teacher once we leave the high school classroom. Why would we not be taught how to innovate for ourselves before it becomes vitally important. 

We need to create for the teachers and we need to invent new ways for this knowledge fuel to help the machine that it is intended for. Don't leet principals tell you that sticking to the curriculum is the only way. Begin inventing now and continue to invent.

To all my future teacher colleagues: be brave and create. 

What People Focus on Becomes Their Reality - Sustaining the Momentum

People live in a world larger than themselves but children are taught within a bubble. Why? Why is it that in life we need to be prepared for anything, and in this preparation, we need to have the appropriate response and be able to use the appropriate resources to formulate that response. If everything is spoon-fed to us in schools, how are we supposed to react at the drop of a hat to something that we never expected? The answer is that we cannot. Teachers MUST model for their students how this thought process works. Unexpected situations cannot doom students to fear and therefore failure. Preparation and reflection are everything. 

The inquiry model of teaching is a fairly new model to the classroom. In saying that it is new, I am not saying that the idea of inquiry is new to the classroom. I am saying that inquiry is newly being welcomed by teachers across the globe. New methods are being created all the time and the sharing of these methods between teachers is constant. [If you have any ideas please share them with me!] In this model, students are asked to pay the closest attention to what matters to them. So in effect, they are not learning a specific topic. They are given a category of ideas or a method of questioning and they are supposed to use the information that is gathered to greater their understanding of the structured topic, or to gain knowledge of how to research and develop ideas upon something that is completely foreign to them. Regardless of the prompts or instructions, everyone participating in an inquiry lesson MUST be willing to reflect fully on every aspect of their process. Did they ask the right questions? Did we take the right steps to find an answer? Is the conclusion a fair one? How can we improve what we did to come to a stronger understanding of the topic or a more appropriate answer?

WE MUST REFLECT ON ALL OF OUR THINKING. OUR STUDENTS MUST DO SO TOO.

This is how we will sustain the "momentum" in our classrooms. If we let students learn what they want and reflect in ways that best motivate them, momentum will not stop. In letting students drive their own learning our learning community keeps growing. (Pretty similar to our online network of perpetual teacher-learners, huh ;-))