The reality is beginning to set in for me - we, as a society, have been "mandated" to train teachers and students to adhere to "standards". These standards have been set before teachers as benchmarks which, in turn, force result-based teaching. I can not help but to wonder does this foster opportunities for our teachers to "teach" or instead manipulate learning experiences to produce results? The bottom line for me is that the No Child Left Behind Act promotes such experiences - it "forces" teachers to get with it or get out. To me this type of "hoop jumping" only serves to take away from the richness of being an individual in the profession that we know as teaching. In other words, it is my belief that if we truly wanted to get our children "up to speed" we would focus more on what is missing (in terms of teaching methodologies) instead of producing this or that result. To me, this is where we are missing the mark to begin with. The reality is that we have standardized everything to death - to the point of losing site of the most important aspect of our children's' development - their education. What is the answer? Well, I could think of several simple immediate answers like restructuring curriculum to meet the needs of all learners and their own individual needs (learning styles or special needs). You may say, "okay that is great but how in the world do we really do this?".
To me, the answer is in Experiential Education. This modality taps into a realm of education that is rarely touched on in traditional education - learning through doing. How often have you been in a lecture-based learning environment. The reality is that Experiential Education can bring learning back to the learner by immersing them in a learning environment. Fortunately, for the educators that use this modality experiential/outdoor education is gaining traction through a new political movement - The No Child Left Inside Act. This may be the answers to our educational needs and deficiencies (programmatic and individual), however, for me administrators will need to trust and remain open to the power of now!
1 comment:
Most are missing the point. The standards are just that, standards. Not having standards is where many states and school districts have come from. They are necessary to ensure that all children have exposure to that which is considered important in a designated curriculum area.
How the standards are taught is another issue. Creative teachers, excellent teachers, natural teachers will design their instruction to meet the needs of their learners. Those teachers will explore and utilize a variety of methods and strategies. One of those might involve taking the classroom outside. I hope so.
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