Yesterday, I considered how we might find a middle path as we figure out how to integrate digital media into our lives. Two more stories today bring me to continue to consider the notion of the middle way as it applies to education.
Eduwonk Andrew Rotherham, in his take on the movie Bully, worries that educators often respond to problems with knee-jerk reactions that lead to zero-tolerance policies that end up making “eye rolling” a bullying offense. And Tim Stahmer pointed to a Bitstrip about the Kahn Academy videos that helps put them in context: useful tools but certainly not revolutionary.
Why is it that we always want THE answer in education? The magic bullet, the shortcut to success, the perfect policy?
When I was a young educator, I remember spending much time crafting my class rules each year in the hopes that if I got it right, I wouldn’t have any discipline problems. I finally discovered that despite the snappy acronym or musical accompaniment (one year I made Aretha Franklin’s Respect the class song), the real way to avoid classroom management problems for me was to engage the students in learning as quickly as possible. So, on the first day of class, while the other teachers were busy going over rules and expectations, I just dove into the work of learning. After all, by seventh grade, my students were pretty much aware that they weren’t supposed to talk while I was talking or poke their neighbors with their pencils. While this approach worked well for me and I suggest it to my student teachers, I also let them know that they will discover their own methods.
It was those same student teachers who taught me a lesson of the perils of painting with a broad brush: we were talking about the Kahn Academy, and I was prepared to be negative when one of my students mentioned how helpful it had been to her in math. While we agreed that it was not revolutionary, it was a great example of the way the Internet could provide students with extra support in their own learning. It was the student’s ability to access knowledge outside the classroom that was the revolutionary idea.
With some 5.5 million students enrolled in nearly 100,000 schools across the country, the idea that any one policy or intervention will work for all of them is just silly. If there is going to be a revolution in education, perhaps it will come when we stop trying to make blanket policies and let schools and their stakeholders determine what works best for them and their learners.
