Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Scheduling a key to needed school reforms

The November 2005 New York Times op-ed piece by Brent Staples, “Why the United States Should Look to Japan for Better Schools,” offers two suggestions for positively reforming education: one on target and one that would move us 180 degrees in the wrong direction. (Sadly, it is the direction we are already headed: toward more regulation.)

Staples’ first suggestion, that we not presume the competence of “novice teachers…on Day One” is partially correct. I think his suggestion of implementing cooperative teacher-development strategies like the “lesson study” used in Japan has some merit. Certainly in most K-12 school settings, teachers have little time to help mentor each other during the day, and this is desperately needed to help both improve skills and improve teacher retention rates nationwide. Improved teacher education (of both pre-service and in-service teachers) IS a huge part of the educational reform solution our nation is crying out for at present.

This need to provide mentoring for other teachers is less one of needing a new PROGRAM than it is of SCHEDULING and CURRICULUM, however. Staples’ second suggestion is that rather than having local control of schools (including curriculum,) the United States should embrace a centralized model of instruction where a single curriculum is used at every grade in every school. This is a bad idea and would be a major mistake.

The requirements of US K-12 school curricula have done nothing but INCREASE over the past decades, really since the beginning of formal schooling. There is no way teachers today can “cover” all the curricular objectives they are formally assigned to teach by both the state and a diverse array of professional organizations.

The solution is NOT more regulation and yet more curricular standards. We will not improve our educational system by legislating more “rules” from on high.

The way we CAN improve our schools is by empowering teachers to serve as the creative artists they are called to be, in helping differentiate the curriculum to meet the diverse and challenging needs of their students. We need EDUCATIONAL DEREGULATION, not more regulation. We do NOT need a national curriculum.

Teachers need more TIME. Remember the debate over “quality time” versus “quantity time” that was probably initiated by the feminist movement many years ago? Well, you have to have quantity time to get quality time when it comes to parent/child relationships. And the same is true in the classroom. Most school days are so scattered in terms of how the day is broken up, however, that chances for deep, intellectual explorations and thinking opportunities are few and far between.

We need educational deregulation when it comes to curricular standards, and we need to CHANGE THE SCHOOL SCHEDULE! Ow! Yes, that is a sacred cow. But, especially at the secondary level, it is ridiculous to keep students in classes all day long that are based on a transmission model of content. Like students in Singapore that Alan November has visited, secondary students should spend half their school day in traditional “classes” and the other half in their “offices” and in conference rooms working with peers to complete assignments and projects.

Teaching and learning are extremely complex activities that are generally vastly oversimplified in the perception of legislators and op-ed writers. Two important pieces of the puzzle that must be addressed, however, are the school SCHEDULE and the need to stop looking to LEGISLATION and REGULATIONS to improve teaching and learning.

Not sure you believe me? Listen to some teacher impact stories. Ask people around you to tell their own. They won’t tell you how the curriculum made all the difference in their educational past. It was a teacher and the relationship he/she had with the person that probably made the most positive, lasting impact. Content does matter. But so do relationships, which are given no attention or short shrift at best in much of the current dialog about school reform.

Doug Simpson and his co-authors have it right in “John Dewey and the Art of Teaching: Toward Reflective and Imaginative Practice.” A single metaphor cannot capture by itself the essence of the ideal teaching role and learning experience.

But we CAN say with certainty that good teachers are ARTISTS, not SCIENTISTS. (This doesn’t mean good teachers don’t teach science– it means the teaching task can’t be scripted and automated in the way many in the current accountability and alternative-certification movements think it can.) We need to empower and retain the passionate ones, and find ways for administrators to fire the “dead wood” teachers that should have retired or resigned many years ago. People are always looking for a new panacea and a new magic bullet to “save education.” Neither a national curriculum or starting a new mentoring program for teachers, as proposed by Staples, is enough or in the right direction for the school reforms our nation’s public schools desperately need.

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On this day..


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