Change. It is a fact of life. We can fight it, we can ignore it, we can let it do us in, we can learn from it and make the best of it.
As an educator there are a couple of arguments that are often made with regards to teaching and change. One argument is that of someone who has been teaching for years. This person will proudly argue that "if we wait long enough the pendulum will swing back in the other direction" or "the way I taught 10 years ago or 20 years ago worked just fine, I don't need to change now."
For all those who argue that or something similar and yet beg to be recognized and valued as a professional, I ask that you open your mind and consider the following scenario.
How would you feel if you doctor or your child's doctor chose to keep the same attitude? Think about it: Your baby fails to thrive.
Your baby can't keep food down.
Your baby grows older and experiences burning through his chest.
Your baby hurts all over and is constantly fatigued.
The doctor with the mindset that what I diagnosed and used as treatment for these symptoms 20 years ago will work today. Your child gets put on some medicines to manage acid reflux and still struggles with day to day life, but hey that's all the doctor knew to do 20 years ago, so it must still be fine.
Now let's take the doctor who has a growth mindset and realizes that your child really has eosinophilic esophagitis, an incurable disease that has a completely different treatment than acid reflux alone. A disease where your child's body is attacking itself because food is viewed as a foreign invader that shouldn't come into the body. You see, this disease, has only started being recognized as an official disease during the past 10-15 years. The doctor relying only on what worked for them 20 years ago will never help your child have a better quality of life.
In education it is no different. The kids today are not the kids of yesterday. Sure, the basics of education and how one learns is the same, but even with the sameness, there are differences. Decades ago students were learning and preparing for jobs that many were familiar with, but today's students are preparing for jobs yet to be created, yet to be thought of.
Today's students are living in a technological world that didn't exist 20 years ago, that didn't exist even 10 years ago. Today's students live in a world where information is readily available within seconds so teaching is no longer about teaching facts to memorize. Instead, it is becoming about teaching students to become critical thinkers, to not accept everything at face value.
These are just a few things about the students in our classes today. If we want to keep them in school and help them learn then we've got to engage them, we've got to get them thinking on their own instead of telling them what to think, and we've got to prepare them for a world that doesn't exist yet.
The other thing I hear and read about is the constant paperwork and lesson plans. And I won't even go into the testing piece. Sure a teacher can be the worst at writing lesson plans and be a great teacher, or a teacher can write exemplary lesson plans and be a terrible teacher, but those two instances are few and far between. Sure an experienced teacher may feel that including just a few key words in plans is enough to "jog" her memory, but let's again visit a medical scenario.
Say your child is going to have surgery and let's just say the doctor has performed this surgery multiple times a day for several years, let's say 15 years. The doctor is confident and sees absolutely no need to use the "mandated" checklist and enter the required surgical notes because of his years of experience. He just quickly glances over things and makes sure the needed supplies are available. It's now 8:00 a.m. and your child just got taken back to the operating room where he will undergo a 3 hour operation. The thing you don't know is that your child's surgeon was up all night the past 2 nights due to a sick child of his own and he just got a call from his brother that his mom is being taken to the local hospital for signs of a heart attack. Although the surgery is routine and your surgeon has performed it thousands of times and he doesn't use a checklist, this one surgery he is overly distracted by what is going on in his personal life. While operating he skips what would be step 3 on the checklist as well as step 18. Not purposefully, but skipped all the same. Your child comes out of the surgery and seems fine at first, but a few days later starts complaining of pains associated to the surgery. An infection has set in or a surgical supply was left in or a something wasn't connected back correctly....all because of a confident doctor who missed a couple of steps.
We want respect as professionals, just the same as doctors often receive, but how much respect would you give that confident doctor who just operated on your child? Are the plans you are writing just regurgitated from year to year, so familiar that you sometimes skip a step that a student may have needed to be successful?
Your baby can't keep food down.
Your baby grows older and experiences burning through his chest.
Your baby hurts all over and is constantly fatigued.
The doctor with the mindset that what I diagnosed and used as treatment for these symptoms 20 years ago will work today. Your child gets put on some medicines to manage acid reflux and still struggles with day to day life, but hey that's all the doctor knew to do 20 years ago, so it must still be fine.
Now let's take the doctor who has a growth mindset and realizes that your child really has eosinophilic esophagitis, an incurable disease that has a completely different treatment than acid reflux alone. A disease where your child's body is attacking itself because food is viewed as a foreign invader that shouldn't come into the body. You see, this disease, has only started being recognized as an official disease during the past 10-15 years. The doctor relying only on what worked for them 20 years ago will never help your child have a better quality of life.
In education it is no different. The kids today are not the kids of yesterday. Sure, the basics of education and how one learns is the same, but even with the sameness, there are differences. Decades ago students were learning and preparing for jobs that many were familiar with, but today's students are preparing for jobs yet to be created, yet to be thought of.
Today's students are living in a technological world that didn't exist 20 years ago, that didn't exist even 10 years ago. Today's students live in a world where information is readily available within seconds so teaching is no longer about teaching facts to memorize. Instead, it is becoming about teaching students to become critical thinkers, to not accept everything at face value.
These are just a few things about the students in our classes today. If we want to keep them in school and help them learn then we've got to engage them, we've got to get them thinking on their own instead of telling them what to think, and we've got to prepare them for a world that doesn't exist yet.
The other thing I hear and read about is the constant paperwork and lesson plans. And I won't even go into the testing piece. Sure a teacher can be the worst at writing lesson plans and be a great teacher, or a teacher can write exemplary lesson plans and be a terrible teacher, but those two instances are few and far between. Sure an experienced teacher may feel that including just a few key words in plans is enough to "jog" her memory, but let's again visit a medical scenario.
Say your child is going to have surgery and let's just say the doctor has performed this surgery multiple times a day for several years, let's say 15 years. The doctor is confident and sees absolutely no need to use the "mandated" checklist and enter the required surgical notes because of his years of experience. He just quickly glances over things and makes sure the needed supplies are available. It's now 8:00 a.m. and your child just got taken back to the operating room where he will undergo a 3 hour operation. The thing you don't know is that your child's surgeon was up all night the past 2 nights due to a sick child of his own and he just got a call from his brother that his mom is being taken to the local hospital for signs of a heart attack. Although the surgery is routine and your surgeon has performed it thousands of times and he doesn't use a checklist, this one surgery he is overly distracted by what is going on in his personal life. While operating he skips what would be step 3 on the checklist as well as step 18. Not purposefully, but skipped all the same. Your child comes out of the surgery and seems fine at first, but a few days later starts complaining of pains associated to the surgery. An infection has set in or a surgical supply was left in or a something wasn't connected back correctly....all because of a confident doctor who missed a couple of steps.
We want respect as professionals, just the same as doctors often receive, but how much respect would you give that confident doctor who just operated on your child? Are the plans you are writing just regurgitated from year to year, so familiar that you sometimes skip a step that a student may have needed to be successful?
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