Entry One: Starting Off

I decided to start blogging about issues, problems, and successes in education. This blog will focus on what I consider the only essential ingredient in our schools today: GOOD TEACHING. More than anything GOOD TEACHING requires good teachers – teachers who are smart, know content in the areas they teach, know about teaching, know process for implementing good learning activities in their classrooms, know about the children they teach and children in general, focus on learning that takes place in their classroom, and have the tools to engage learners in high levels of learning whatever the age of the learner and the background. I will probably also talk about the DARK SIDE of education and try to balance the problems that grow out of the negative aspects of education. I think that teaching is an essential art form that needs outstanding practitioners. This blog is my location for contributions to a Good Teaching Initiative (GTI) that seems missing from much of the open public discourse today.

As part of this blog, I will take on the testing establishment because I believe testing has gotten out of hand. I am not one of the growing number of people who want to emulate Nancy Reagan’s drug policies and just say no to tests (for instance, see the Bartleby Project at http://bartlebyproject.com/, which I have joined and follow). I believe that there must be some tests, and government assessment of student progress is a viable government function given public funding of education. I believe the greatest problem with the testing establishment is that it replaced the centrality of the teacher, teaching, and learning with the centrality of the tests. I believe that the testing establishment in its rush to make money is setting up all teachers as interchangeable replacement parts rather than building good teachers into great teachers. Testing and test preparation is taking too much time away from the essential processes of education: teaching and learning.

Furthermore, both the liberal and conservative approaches to schools are failing. Why? Liberals believed that throwing money at the problems and letting the schools develop professionally would work. Conservative believed that testing and various accountability programs would work. The liberal approach relied on the goodness of people involved in the schools and the lack of corruption and hypocrisy of the political, labor union, and educational systems. The conservative approach relied on the business-industrial-military-prison model for quality in the schools. We are left now with an increasingly wide gap between the schools that are appearing to succeed and those that are appearing to fail, but appearances are deceiving. We have a long trail of federal interference in education. The problem here is that NONE of it has succeeded in making better schools, better teachers, and GOOD TEACHING.  

I do believe that governments should establish policies regarding education. These policies should be focused on providing fair, equitable access to good teachers in high quality schools. Every school should be clean, well-lighted, well-supplied, and accessible for every child. Every child should have access to instruction that helps him or her learn to maximal capacity. Every school should have space for its children to work and play. Every school should have access to books and technologies that provide children with information about everything that is know about every aspect of the world and every book ever published. Every school should have classrooms with multimedia capabilities that allow the teacher and the children to transform the classroom into any environment conceivable: so students studying the rainforest can be inside that environment with its sights and sounds, so students studying Rome can be in ancient Rome and hear Julius Caesar address the senate, but also view the city today. Children should meet: various bacteria in magnified environments on surfaces and in organs of the body; coelacanths in deep sea habitats; Pythagoras studying mathematics on Sammos, Egypt, Babylon, and Sicily; Sokrates and Plato discussing philosophy in Athens; Darius the Great preparing for war on the Greeks; Chin Shi Hwangdi surviving assassination attempts in his palace and organizing the first Chinese dynasty; Lincoln making the Gettysburg address and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation; Washington at Mount Vernon and accepting the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown; Atahualpa Inca struggling with controlling an empire against Spanish invaders; and various people living in difficult times with different professions, as well as read about them. But paramount is for every school to have good teachers who can guide learning and provide cutting edge teaching tailored to learners based on classroom assessments and performances.

 I'm ready to outlaw test prep time from the classroom. I call this the "Good Teaching Initiatives" (GTI) for now. GTI needs a teacher-by-teacher revolt with support from children and parents; and we need to let administrators know that no time will be spend on test prep because it interferes with children’s real learning in the classroom. Then we need parents, teachers, administrators, and school after school to let the legislature, the governor, and the president know that the test prep time should be eliminated from every curriculum and replaced by good teaching and learning activities. If the president, the governor, and the legislature are unable to comply with GTI (i.e., enact it into law and reduce the testing burden), then all schools and teachers should refuse to administer any tests, but go on teaching better and better with the students performing real tasks to demonstrate their competencies, rather than tests. This is a core of an idea that needs to be spread; I'll probably work on elaborating it further. Maybe we should design a school without tests. So this blog is about GTI.

Good Teaching Initiative Richard Speaker Blog

GTIrbs.blogspot.com

Entry One: Starting Off