While mowing yesterday my mind wandered – as it often does – and here are some of those thoughts. Not too many answers but more questions….
- Is it possible to “quantify” a teacher’s impact on a student? Is there really a tool that can do this? For every teacher? Who has time to go through all of this data?
- Is it possible to “quantify” all of the other outside school factors that impact a student’s learning? Think: nutrition, safety, sleep, family structure/support etc. how would we change our education system with the data?
- What if every teacher in the state refused to give a standardized test? What if we gave a standardized test every six weeks and got instant feedback? Would this track student growth more efficiently?
- What if every teacher assessed their students in an alternative way? Portfolio, project, community outreach, etc.
- What would happen if we allowed teachers to teach, at max, four hours each day? Then used those other hours to lesson plan? No other required duties allowed.
- What if there was a law that banned scripted, test prep lessons? Would teachers take more risks in the classroom?
- What if we changed school districts and matched them to county lines? Does anything change? If so is it so bad we regret it or after a few years does it work out?
- What if we only allowed people with masters degrees to be teachers? Would this make a difference in the impact a teacher makes?
- What if school districts stopped funding athletics? Athletics became a community club organization, similar to Europe. Would this save any money? Or would the loss of revenue from ticket sales make the difference?
- Why don’t teachers vote? With early voting and mail-in ballots, what is so hard about this? Would we vote if our name went into the mega-millions lottery? Would this be a bad idea?
I don’t have too many answers here…just lots of questions – it seems to me that there are some things that teachers could do better. There is also a lot of room for policy creators to improve. Together – we will make a positive change!
Pardon any significant typos – this was done on my phone at my son’s soccer practice 🙂
Teaching From Here 
Love these questions. i like questions with no easy answers…they’re the ones that linger…and linger.
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Posted by claudiaswisher | November 13, 2015, 9:23 amHard questions don’t have easy answers! That’s why it is so hard to make a positive change on education when only focusing on one thing. Hard questions really get us thinking 🙂
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Posted by Teaching From Here | November 13, 2015, 9:46 amJust so happens that all the even-numbered items in your list struck a chord with me:
#2: I expect they could be quantified. And of course it needs to be a priority to work to eliminate or at least minimize each one. BUT what we can’t allow happening is these be excuses for students NOT getting effective learning. For sure it will be more difficult but we in education MUST find a way to facilitate every student’s effective learning skills!
#4: My suggested alternative question: Why doesn’t every teacher assess students in an alternative way??? The three examples are each a good one.
#6: There should be a law banning use of scripted, test prep lessons! But teachers should understand and fight them – refuse to use them being best. Sadly, though, even if they were banned, too many (one is too many for me) would still teach to THEIR classroom tests!!!
#8: Here’s where my lack of School of Ed curricula comes out. I don’t know if undergrad or grad OR neither curriculum emphasizes and expects pre-service teachers (will never understand that phrase…) to understand, utilize in schools, and discuss resulting experiences in the classroom; BUT if they both don’t do so, then both curricula must change! Then there will be an impact on student effective learning. I do believe this, however: Anecdotally, I hear too many MS Education programs allow student plucking of disjointed and often too non-meaningful courses, resulting in a worthless MS degree; these may satisfy job requirements but won’t impact student effective learning!!! Same thing happens all too often with MS Engineering degree programs by the way. One solution: Require a meaningful thesis and/or an oral exit examination – preferably both but, for me, oral examination should be required of all MS students!!!
#10: Teachers don’t vote for maybe the same reasons many people don’t vote: We are too often voting for the lesser of two bad choices – people who will vote the party line on issues, never considering the facts and justification for seeking to make things better. Teachers being in the public sector for the most part, this is only made worse.
So there is my input on some of your excellent questions.
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Posted by jcbjr9455 | November 13, 2015, 3:59 pm