public schools – Moving Paradigms

Dear Teens

http://publicdomainarchive.com/public-domain-images-woman-earth-globe-white-short-outdoors-water-reflection/ — http://bit.ly/1KAzfNf

I see what you’ve been doing. I’ve been noticing it for a while now. Almost weekly you are solving intractable problems that have had adults stymied for years. A cheap way to check for pancreatic cancer. Stopping the spread of germs on planes. Cutlery that scans for bacteria. A rain and fireproof sleeping bag for the homeless. The list gets longer each time I look.

And what amazes me is that even when you don’t have many resources, you’re re-inventing the world. You’re doing it with scraps from dump heaps and in places where there are few books and only occasional electricity.

I’m envious. You’re just newly arrived here on this planet and yet you seem to see much more than we who have been here for many decades. Perhaps we have become jaded or too resigned to the world we know?

Of course it helps that you don’t have to invent mathematics. Or the printing press. Or the Internet. With easy access to the collective pantry of human ideas, you are deftly repurposing and reconfiguring what you find here.

And you do this despite what you learned in kindergarten, one of the first lessons in school: stay inside the lines. Luckily for us, you realize that colouring outside the lines can create a completely different picture. It’s outside conventional lines of thought that creative solutions lie. As you are well aware, it’s outside we’ll all have to go if we have any hope of leaving a livable planet for your children.

You’re quite concerned about the state of the planet you find yourself on and so apart from all the scientific breakthroughs you’re making, you’re also stirring change socially and politically in ways that sometimes stuns.

Those of us who are watching you know that Malala Yousafzi is not an anomaly, that there are many like her who refuse to accept the norm as normal for young women. We know not all 12-year-olds can start an organization like Free the Children but there are many more like Craig Kielburger who want to end social iniquities such as child slavery. We know that First Nations youth are “idle no more” despite their inheritance of a painful legacy. And we know that Victoria Barrett, who is suing the Obama administration, is at the vanguard of youth demanding that something be done to mitigate climate change.

There are multitudes of you with many brilliant ideas but too often those ideas are being buried beneath your boredom and frustration in schools. It was no surprise to see in a recent study by Yale that 75% of you are either bored or frustrated or tired in schools. It’s certainly no surprise to Sir Ken Robinson who has for decades been urging schools to allow you to be who you are: creative problem solvers.

But despite his message resonating with teachers worldwide, too many politicians insist that you become human calculators, writers of the 5-paragraph essay and memorizers of the information you can access within nanoseconds on that device in your pocket.

It’s no wonder that many of you are tired. I would be exhausted every day if I had to adjust and adapt to a new environment every hour as you do in schools. How do you cope with being in Biology for an hour and then completely changing your train of thought to adapt to French or Physics in the next hour? How do you adjust to the emotional climate of so many different classrooms and teachers each day? The effort must be daunting!

I wish that schools nurtured your creativity instead of punishing it. I wish that you were given time each day to allow your ideas to gestate. And I fervently wish that public schools were funded as a priority so that you had all the tools you needed to show us what we cannot see.

If these wishes came true for all of you and not just a few, I can’t imagine what you could do.

But I bet you can.

In admiration,

A Teacher

Change from the Inside

empty classroom — http://www.imcreator.com/free/education/empty-classroom-2

(This blog is a complement to Dear Students published in Huff Post)

What do we teachers do while we wait for politicians to agree with us that 19th century school structures are obsolete in the 21st century, and that creativity, not competition, is what we should be nurturing in students?

We change the system from within.

First, we do the work inside ourselves when we gather up our courage to release our role of content deliverer and accept that we need to be in constant role change in our classrooms: sometimes a facilitator, sometimes a mentor, sometimes a host creating a safe space for learning to happen.

Decentering our classrooms in this way is difficult work, and is never complete. It’s not a one-day Pro-D affair. It requires vulnerability to realize that we need not be the fount of wisdom in the front of the room.We need to be patient but persistent with this work.

We share our decentering ideas with our colleagues so that we put the magic of combinatorial creativity to work. We remix ideas from here and there to find what will fit with our students in our classrooms. There’s a lot of trial and error involved with this. Lots of reading too.

We know that this is a Sisyphean task; sometimes that rock will roll all the way down the hill. But we have to get up and do it again. And we will, with help from our friends and allies who know why we do what we do and why it’s worth the struggle.

I was “lucky” to have been both a student and a teacher in South Africa during Apartheid because there I developed my tendency to read between the lines of any curriculum and to constantly seek ways around stifling restrictions and impositions in schools.

You may think that there is a world of difference between the education system in South Africa and in Canada, until you remember that both Canada and South Africa are former British colonies and both countries imported the same industrial model of education. Much of what I do now in Canada is a further refinement of what I did in South Africa when I became a teacher by accident. But that’s another story.

There is nothing that a teacher can do about the way a school day is divided, but there is a lot that a teacher can do when shaping each day in her classroom. I teach the humanities to teens in a school that has “inner-city” characteristics. We have four teaching blocks a day: two in the morning and two after a 40 min lunch. Each block is 77 mins.

My classroom activities are dependent on which block of the day it is. Sometimes there is a lecture, sometimes an experiential activity, sometimes a check-in to see where everyone is at, sometimes a nap or meditation before any work is done. My decision of what to do when is guided by neuroscience research about how teen brains work. They do not work at full capacity first thing in the morning or during the last block of the day, so I save us all the struggle by not lecturing at those times.

I use my classroom space like a Star Trek holodeck. Sometimes it’s a laboratory, sometimes a country, sometimes a court, sometimes a parliament and sometimes a lounge where conversation happens. It is of course sometimes just a classroom!

I encourage students to ask me questions either directly, through email or anonymously through the very popular Question Box. Questions from students provide me with insights into their concerns and what I’m missing in my teaching. A colleague who teaches Math adopted and adapted this idea, but her box is called the Panic box – where students place “panic button” questions about course content.

I do very little lecturing and try as much as possible to convert the curriculum in a way that allows my students to engage in Problem-Based Learning and Experiential Learning. When I first started doing this, I didn’t know that that was what it was called! Often times I “make the road while walking”, trying to find ways to bring meaningful learning experiences to my students.

In my dreams, I see Problem-Based Learning and Experiential Learning as the foundation of what is done in public schools in the future.

And I do hope, despite the concerted campaign to defund public education, that we manage to hold on to public schools. They are still critically important, despite their many flaws.

Public schools are much more than places where accredited learning happens. They are a safe space for students whose home lives are difficult; they are the oasis in dangerous neighbourhoods; they are where many students eat their only meal each day and where they can speak to an adult about their fears and concerns.

Public schools are some of the few public spaces we have left that still function as a commons, a space for people, not for profit.

Where else but in a public school can a teen who gets a $30 000 car for his 16th birthday sit next to one who eats only three meals a week?

With so many of our common spaces being taken over by corporations, a public school is a vital social space for many students. It is still the great societal leveller where students from diverse backgrounds can meet on common ground.

The education system has to change, it’s true, but let’s work to repurpose it. Let’s not throw the cup out with the cold coffee.

Let’s change the system from the inside out.

Welcome Space

As each school day begins, my colleague, Christine, stands at the door of her classroom , coffee cup in hand, greeting every student by name as they walk in. Sometimes the greeting includes a query about their well-being or a comment on how well they did on an assignment. Sometimes it’s just a huge smile and a “Good morning”.

When I walk past her classroom before the school day begins, it is always filled with kids. None of them her current students. Most of them had been her students when they were in Grade 8 but even though they’re now in Grades 11 or 12, they still go to her classroom every morning.

At lunch her room is filled with even more kids as she hosts a “movie club” which is really a safe space for kids who do not easily “fit” into any stereotypical group in a high school. What must it mean for those students to have such a space where they can feel at home?

How many classrooms had you been in at the end of your 13 years of schooling? If your experience is typical, that number should be about 48. In how many of those classrooms did you feel welcome and safe? Like you belonged, like you mattered?

Faced with yet another barrage of cuts to our education budget, I’ve wondered why there is no widespread public outrage. Why is there no massive public anger about the lack of resources, the overcrowded classrooms in schools? Why no parents marching in the streets all throughout the province to restore funding for a public education system that everyone agrees is fundamentally important in a democracy?

It is not as if there is no precedent for parent protest if one considers what happens when a beloved local school is threatened with closure.

But why the silence when the public education system as a whole is under enormous threat?

Is it perhaps because, if we think about those 48 classrooms we sat in, most of what we remember is feeling bored or unwelcome or unsafe?

The pupils of today are going to be the voting public of tomorrow. Each school day, we teachers create the ingredients for the memories each student will take with them when they enter adulthood and their roles as voters.

If we create spaces in our classrooms and in our schools that are socially inviting, emotionally safe and intellectually stimulating, not only will our students have better learning experiences (as neuroscience research is proving) but when those students become voters, they will be more likely to fight to defend an education system for which they have fond memories.

And that would also ensure that teachers could keep teaching in public schools.

Everyone would win if more classrooms were more inviting despite egregious cuts to school district budgets during the current political climate.

And yes, this can be done. I will share, in future posts, examples from my time as a teacher in Apartheid -era South Africa as well as in an under-funded school in Canada. I also suggest my post Jugaad Education.

When a local municipality recently threatened to push a road through a popular park, people took to the streets, motivated by all their memories of time spent in the park and wanting to ensure that their children had those memories too. Let’s create classroom spaces that would be as powerful a motivation to defend public education.