Ben Kestner

Reduce the Number of Students a Teacher Sees

The first step in this process is for administrators to work on reducing the number of students a teacher gets to see in any given week. If a teacher sees 240 plus students a week, I’m not sure if she or he can possibly know their kids. What’s the perfect number? I don’t know. I guess 1-1 teacher student ratio isn’t achievable or desirable within a school system, but anything over 80, I would say is too much.

Metacognition as an Essential part of the Curriculum

Once over this hurdle then we need to identify what kind of learners our students are. The student needs to be able to look at her or his own learning style and work out how they work best in a given circumstance. We can support this process by making room for metacognition in our curriculum. Not just make room, in my opinion, but make metacognition an integral part of the curriculum. Knowing about knowing. Teachers can use many tools and activities for helping students identify their learning style. The teachers and students can then work out when and how they use particular strategies for learning.

Getting to know the Student’s Individual Interests

As well as having a good idea of each of their students’ learning needs, the teacher also needs to get to know their students. What are their interests outside school, how many siblings do they have, what makes them happy, what makes them frustrated etc. Once this is known we can as educators, connect to those interests and use real life examples and experiences in their learning. Not just real world in terms of relating to the world around them, but real world in the way the learning connects with what the student finds interesting.

Each child is different. Each will have their own learning styles and interests. This makes designing learning experiences very difficult for a teacher. Of course, in a class of 25 students or more, a teacher will need to generalize. She or he cannot possibly plan their classes around each individual student in a situation like that. But what the teacher can do is help the student to learn about themselves and to take control and responsibility for some of their own learning. This is after all our goal. To help students become independent learners for the rest of their lives.

This Year’s Theme:

“Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women”

WESTERN MONTANA GROWERS COOPERATIVE

Farmers need to think carefully about the conditions for growing if their crops are to flourish.

Places for learning need to think carefully about the conditions for learning if their students are to flourish.

I say ‘places for learning’ over ‘schools’ and ‘learning institutions’ or even ‘places of learning’ because we need to rethink and challenge norms and pre-existing assumptions if we are to try to address the needs of our students right now today. The currency we are going to give our students today to interact with a fast changing world is very different from the currency we gave our students before.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend time over the last six summers or so on my sister-in-laws’ farm. A beautiful setting with wonderful organic produce.

Visiting a farm at one of the busiest times of the year requires the visitor to help, and so I have been involved as a worker, getting invloved where I can. Whilst farming is by no means an area of expertise I can boast, I do know that the right conditions are crucial for the produce to flourish. A careful balance of knowledge, experience as well as a reliance on weather conditions, water sun etc.

Education is no different. We need to create the best conditions for learners to flourish. A place where they can grow.  The teacher is the farmer with a huge responsibility.

When I walk in and out of classrooms at school, I look carefully at the conditions for learning. Not only the physical space (the land) but the nurturing and coaching of the teacher (maintaining and utilizing the weather conditions) as well as the resources available (the tools).

 I think kids flourish in learning environments which:

• support innovative thought
• encourage questioning and critical thinking
• encourage discovery
• offer space to grow as a learner with unique styles and needs
• are fun

 So, lets get out there with our wellies on, equipped with the tools and start growing!

We are part of an increasingly globally-connected and knowledge-based world and educators have the responsibility of continuing to prepare students for what is around them and what they will experience when they leave school. Our task is not easy. We do not really know how the world will look in five, ten, or twenty years’ time. So preparing them for what we don’t know seems impossible.

But even though we are witnessing mind-boggling advances in technology in many aspects of life, the real goals of education have not changed. It is important that our children continue to love learning new things throughout their lives. We want to nurture confident and healthy students, physically, mentally and emotionally, who understand their own bodies and ways of thinking.  We want to encourage caring and compassionate students who will make a contribution to the well-being of the world around them.

Currently in the Middle School I am at, we are examining our curriculum framework and pedagogical practices to make sure that we are providing the best possible opportunities for our students. A quality curriculum and quality teaching go hand in hand as we go forward.

Skills and concepts that are vitally important for our students in this fast-changing world include collaboration, communication, global thinking, critical thinking and information technology literacy, which need to be fostered in a creative and innovative environment. Humans have a wide range of cognitive abilities and so we must offer a balanced curriculum, giving opportunities for our students to explore and experience in a number of settings.

The role of a teacher is that of a coach. In this age of instant information, teachers can no longer think of themselves as the giver of knowledge (I would argue that they should never have thought this), which is eaten and then regurgitated by the students. Teachers need to support, encourage and nurture a talent or interest and help students to learn independently. By establishing an exciting and welcoming learning environment, we as educators invite students to take an active role in the learning process, as they use tools provided to enhance and promote their own enrichment.  This, in turn, builds the foundation of the entire community, as every individual student engages in learning as a celebratory and empowering enterprise. 

At St. John’s International School, Belgium, we have made huge advances in providing our students with these tools. We have a new data management system, full Wi-Fi throughout the school, one-to-one netbooks being rolled out in four grades this year, a new virtual learning environment for students (Study wiz) and a strong commitment to investing in technology and professional development for staff.

But we also have a strong commitment to what we see as the real goals of education: helping students to be themselves and helping them to understand that they have choices in life that can have a huge impact on themselves and the lives of others. There is a quote carved above a fireplace in the dining hall at Earlham College in the States that says “They gathered the sticks, kindled the fire and left it burning”. This, for me, describes our job perfectly. “Keep it burning” is our goal.

Click below for Article

Washington Post 24 August 2010

Very upsetting ‘school reform’ story…. following on from my recent blog.

CLICK on this link:

nytimes

Diane Ravitich, in her book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” talks about some of today’s most popular ideas for reforming and restructuring schools in the U.S., including privatization, standardized tests and punitive accountability. She describes a journey of personal change. A change of view and direction from what she believed in to what she believes is the best hope for U.S. public education. She argues that focusing too much on accountability and and choice which has been the education agenda since George H. W. Bush’s administration through Clinton, Bush Jnr and now into Obama’s agenda, is destroying public education in the states today.

The fixation on standardized tests which do not not necessarily have to follow the curriculum content and the use of data to test school’s performance thus offering parents ‘choice’, is destroying the development and nuturing of creativity in the U.S. school system. Schools have been forced to spend valuable funding on focusing on Math and Reading at the expense of other areas of learning, especially the Arts, History and Geography. Ravitich notices that ” What was once considered the conservative agenda has now become a bipartisan agenda in Education in the U.S.”

She also notes that ” It is time for those who want to improve our schools to focus on the essentials of education. We must make sure that our schools have a strong, coherent, explicit curriculum that is grounded in the liberal arts and sciences, with plenty of oppurtunity for children to engage in activities and projects which make learning lively”

No Child Left Behind was the pinnacle of the movement which had been gaining ground through two previous administrations. Standards, Accountability and Choice. On the face of it great concepts. I think most of us agree that standards are important. We need to have an idea of what students need to achieve and what they are learning. In the world outside education (is there one?) we are all thankful that there are standards. From quality of water supply to operating room cleanliness and proceedures. But standards seem to have been replaced by an over emphasis on testing. Testing which has led to the reduction in key areas of the curriculum content. Testing which is summative and not formative. The results of which are used to judge schools on performance.

Anyone who has discussed education matters with me or who has read this blog will know that I am passionate about kids getting real-life experiences at school within a broad curriculum framework which gives equal importance to all traditional disciplines or subjects. The curriculum needs to foster creative and critical thinking, whilst at the same time identifying and supporting the child’s individual needs and interests. There are many schools and movements (some of which I have written about) which support this idea. Sadly, the U.S. public school system seems not able to.

A recent article in ‘Newsweek’ by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman entitled ” The Creativity Crisis” (July 2010) talks about how research shows that American creativity is declining. The article quotes Jonathan Plucker from Indiana University, who recently analayzed data from the Torrance test for creativity. He found that the correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood I.Q. The idea that a child is “Intelligent” if they have a high I.Q. is not accurate, in my opinion. Creativity is the key. Kids who scored highly on Torrance’s creativity tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors and software developers.

Kyung Hee Kim at the college of William and Mary discovered, after anaylising almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults that creative scores had been steadily rising in the U.S., just like I.Q. scores until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have gone down. So why is this happening? One idea is that the number of hours children spend in front of computer screens playing computer games has increased. Children seem not to be engaging in creative activities at home as much. Another, is that schools, where kids spend alot of their lives have been responsible for taking creativity out of children, or at the very least, not giving kids the oppurtunities to be creative. I recall Sir Ken Robinson saying “Ask a group of pre-school children who can dance and they all put their hands up. Ask a group of High school students, and hardly any will put their hands up”. Are schools killing creativity? I don’t blame the teachers, I don’t blame the schools. I blame the train of NCLB which is picking up speed and is continuing into the Obama administration today. NCLB has led to  fierce competition for funding and survival. It has lead to stressed teachers who are under huge pressure to perform for the test. And it has led to creativity being squeezed out of schools.

Creativity spans all disciplines. Not just the Arts. Teachers and schools need to be given some breathing space. There are plenty of examples of how schools, given realistic standards can employ project based well structured, real life examples can foster creativity.

If you are reading this Mr. Obama, I have the answer. So do hundreds of  thousands of other educators out there who believe in the importance of creativity. Keep schools small. Focus on the child’s interests, have national standards and give schools the freedom to breathe. Give schools space to offer real life creative experiences for all kids. Scrap NCLB and introduce NCLCB. No Child Left Creatively Behind. Take back the power of curriculum content and testing from the individual States and take repsonsibility for education yourself.

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