As I was
tweeting on Twitter one night last spring, I noticed a barrage of tweets
bearing the hashtag #dontfailme (a hashtag, for those of you who haven't discovered Twitter, is a way to “tag” tweets for easy
searches and is created by using the # sign with the words running together
without spaces or punctuation).
Curiosity won over me as I began to read these tweets, and I soon discovered
people were tweeting about a special report CNN journalist Soledad O’Brien
hosted entitled Don’t Fail Me: Education in America. In fact, so many people tweeted
about this topic using the #dontfailme hashtag that it trended on May 15,
meaning that it was one of the most popular hashtags being used on Twitter at
any given point in time nationwide. While this phenomenon impressed me,
it also made me realize that I am not alone in my concern that education is in
crisis mode. I missed this report on May 15 but made sure to watch the
re-airing later that same week.
Education in America: Don't Fail Me Part 1
You can find other excerpts from this special on YouTube.
As O’Brien’s
CNN special noted, the state of education in America is at a critical point
now. Look at any research or data, and you will find any number of
alarming statistics ranging from only 16% of high school students enroll and
complete Calculus (O’Brien) to approximately 1.2 million students fail to
graduate from high school, more than half of whom are from minority groups
(Alliance, p. 1). In my opinion, the purpose of teaching and learning, is
a “casserole dish”, if you will, of several ingredients: developing
engaging lessons, giving choices to students of how to present what they have
learned, building rapport with students, giving feedback on student learning,
and aiding students in developing resiliency. Though different chefs may
present arguments for different ingredients in the educational casserole, I
feel the aforementioned ones make the most difference in my 22 years of
experience.
While the end
product of teaching is to provide society with productive and knowledgeable
young adults who can build successful lives for themselves, teachers have to
first impart this knowledge. Schlechty states that it is no easy task as
“. . . the world of the young and the world of adults have grown further and
further away from each other” (2001, p 20). To educate students in today’s
society, I feel you have to develop engaging lessons, give choices to students
of how to present what they have learned, and build rapport with
students.
Teachers must
keep students engaged as a part of learning. I also
feel it is important to give students choices in how they present the
information they have learned. It helps to make them feel independent and
gives them more ownership. Meeting with my students one-on-one to
conference about options available to them and showing them quality examples of
previous students’ work helps them decide on what they want to do.
Finally, in terms of teaching students, I believe that teachers MUST develop a
rapport with their students. Baruti Kafele notes that “. . . your
students must actually like
you if they are to do well in class—and in order for them to like you, you must
show that you like them” (2009, p. 9). Kafele is so emphatic
on this point that he even asserts, “even a brilliant student needs a teacher
who understands how to make solid connections with him” (p. xiv). Developing relationships is
quite important, and Schlechty documents that in order to provide engaging
work, teachers “. . . must understand their students well enough to know which
of these qualities are likely to be important to students . . .” (p.
107). McLeod, Fisher, and Hoover maintain that a teacher’s classroom
climate of learning is based on “. . . the relationships that are established
between the teacher and students. . .” (p. 62). As noted by these
educators, students do not care what you know until they know that you care.
Teachers teach
and students learn, or so we hope.
Even so, some best practices can help students learn better than
others. Brookhart (2008) did
extensive research regarding teacher commentary on student work and found that
“writing comments was more effective for learning than giving grades” (p.
7). As an alternative teacher with
smaller than average class sizes, I utilize this best practice on a daily basis
and find that it does help. My
feedback comes in the form of written communication as well as verbal comments
during one-on-one conferences. The
other strategy that I feel is vital is helping students, especially ones that
are at-risk, to be resilient. One
of the crises that Kafele (2009) addresses in his book is the “self-crisis,” a
term to describe the breakdown of an individual person. If a student does not have a high self-esteem
or a positive self-image or even a certain amount of self-discipline, he/she
will not be very resilient, and resiliency is the key to overcoming setbacks,
not only in an educational setting, but also in life.
References
Alliance
for Excellent Education. (2009). Retrieved from http:/ /www
.all4ed.org/files/
GraduationRates_FactSheet.pdf
Brookhart,
S. M. (2008). How to give effective feedback to your students. Alexandria:
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Kafele,
B. K. (2009). Motivating black males to achieve in school and in life.
Alexandria:
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
McLeod,
J., Fisher, J., & Hoover, G. (2003). The key elements of classroom
management:
managing time and space, student behavior, and
instructional
strategies.
Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
O’Brien,
S. (2011). Don’t fail me: education in America. CNN
Schlechty,
P. C. (2001). Shaking up the schoolhouse: how to support and sustain
educational
innovation. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
No comments:
Post a Comment