After so many years of research in education, experience in and out of the classroom with students, and multiple discussions with them of how they feel education should change, this is a read that speaks to my heart. It does address most of the teacher to student gaps, pragmatically. There is acknowledgement that historically, many of the factors that have caused students to be so dreadful of class time, are models that were put in place in the late 1800s in order to carry out social engineering and conforming goals of the elite through schooling. I have often said that education reform may not happen because it is students and society that want reform, not necessarily those in charge of education policies.
This is an excerpt that is posted on EducationNews.org; the link to the entire article is posted below the following excerpt- a worthwhile read!!
...:::Turned Off Younger Teachers
The factory model high school is also turning off our younger teachers who must replace the huge cohort of “Baby Boom” teachers who have already begun to retire. Too many become discouraged by the isolation from colleagues they feel in these schools. These younger teachers also perceive that bonding and sustainable healthy relationships among and between students and teachers occurs all too infrequently in such schools. From the Facebook and Twitter generation, they correctly intuit that you can’t achieve academic rigor in schools without these relationships and for that matter relevance of the curriculum to the career and life challenges that await students. Additionally, compared to how work is organized in non-school settings, they see that the factory model school is a huge time waster with time lost transitioning between classrooms, achieving order, taking attendance, reviewing previous day's lesson, and continual interruptions and school announcements. No wonder 1/3 of new teachers quit in 3 years; 1/2 within 5 years.
The factory model high school is also turning off our younger teachers who must replace the huge cohort of “Baby Boom” teachers who have already begun to retire. Too many become discouraged by the isolation from colleagues they feel in these schools. These younger teachers also perceive that bonding and sustainable healthy relationships among and between students and teachers occurs all too infrequently in such schools. From the Facebook and Twitter generation, they correctly intuit that you can’t achieve academic rigor in schools without these relationships and for that matter relevance of the curriculum to the career and life challenges that await students. Additionally, compared to how work is organized in non-school settings, they see that the factory model school is a huge time waster with time lost transitioning between classrooms, achieving order, taking attendance, reviewing previous day's lesson, and continual interruptions and school announcements. No wonder 1/3 of new teachers quit in 3 years; 1/2 within 5 years.
No Academic Rigor without Relationships and Relevance What should replace the industrial era factory model high school? That is, which curricula and school structures would best help American teenagers re-engage in school and meet the higher and better standards we’ve been developing for the last 20 years? Answering such questions should claim most of our investment dollars for K-12 education. Yet we continue to divert our energies and resources to more and better tests and other strategies that have questionable payoff such as closing failed schools or re-opening them under new management or with a different staff. Another questionable strategy is to provide huge amounts of professional development without fundamentally changing the curriculum.
Opinions abound on which curricular innovations make sense, and a fairly sophisticated evaluation industry is developing to determine which ones produce the best results. Opinion seems to be coalescing around a few principles that point the direction for future change. First and foremost, is that a high school is unlikely to establish academic rigor without strong interpersonal relationships and relevance of the curricula to employment and life challenges.
Relationships require a nurturing environment where faculty and students are together long enough to be able get to know and bond with one another. To provide such an environment, a growing number of high schools are assigning students to the same homeroom and/or the same counselor for all four years. Other schools use the house system in which teachers go to where the students are and students remain in the same group for all or most of their classes. This is in stark contrast to the factory model high school where students typically change work groups, supervisors (viz. teachers) and classrooms 5-6 times a day. This traditional model is particularly dysfunctional for students in poverty and those from single parent homes, many of whom have an emotional-psychological mindset that will not allow them to learn and establish in their minds a compelling vision of success.
Relationships and bonding among students and teachers is also enhanced through smaller schools or breaking down larger schools into smaller theme-oriented schools or academies that have a fair amount of operational independence.::: ...read the full piece here.
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