School Verse Learning
I love my school and the teachers I work with. However, I'm not blind to the way the school has been designed to reach certain test scores and criteria on a rubric during an evaluation. I'm sad to admit that we lean to the school side of the spectrum more than the learning side more often than not. We require students to recall information and not apply it. We try to engage them in a process and don't prompt them to go out and use what they learn. As an elective teacher I have more freedom in lessons I teach and the way I teach them. I can't imagine the strength and ingenuity it takes for a core teacher to take the state standards and make them something that empowers a student.
Many teachers are scared to flip the learning so that the students start with their own questions because they don't know how it will turn out. When you spoon feed information you can assume that it will look fairly similar when it is regurgitated. The longer a teacher is in the profession the harder it is to change how you do things in your classroom but it is the teacher willing to take risks and keep doing what is best for students (and not just easiest for them) that will be more influential in a student's life.
I can only imagine how much more learning would occur if we focused our energy on empowering students and not just engaging them in a check list of skills.
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