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Student Calls for a Learning Revolution
I read this article, and I could only think of the frustration experienced by students AND teachers across America. I don't know about you, but in my school, everyone is extremely worried right now about our evaluations. We now have to "prove" we are effective teachers by putting together a portfolio that makes the student teaching portfolio I put together ten years ago look like child's play! I need to document what I do in five different domains. There are four to five categories in each domain. I have already been told it is "bad" to be highly or minimally effective. I have to "prove" how I help students grow, reach out to students before and after school, grow professionally, contact parents, create assessments, use data to drive my decisions, etc. Everthing is based on data! Reading this article made me wonder what we ARE teaching students. The author makes an amazing point: we are taking creativity and originality totally out of the equation. The author is a high school student himself, and I couldn't agree with him more! If more students and teachers refused to use every day as another "data collection" day, I think better learning would occur. That being said, we might all be fired...
Sorry if this post is so negative. The article really was great!!! I am just very frustrated by the people running the education system today, and this article pointed out to me that I am my peers are not the ones most affected by it; our students are the ones who are most affected. What do we do to make this learning revolution happen???
I could not agree more with you. This is one of my biggest frustrations right now. Our district is transitioning to a PLC district. While the philosophy of PLCs is remarkable... I personally have a hard time accepting the he data driven approach my district is devoting all of our SIPD to. Why? Well you nailed it... No creativity. Even more, I am in a "lazy department" where less work is more. They would rather copy worksheets from the text publishers rather than create meaningful, engaging lessons. Technology use to them, is playing a history based movie so they have a week off 'teaching'... And my administrators want us to teach the same and give the same tests for comparable date. Umm, no thanks. That is not effective teaching.
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