10 or 12 Wright Fellows At A Time

 I’d like to reflect on the following from “Flat World”: “Expert teachers and leaders are the key resource for improving student learning.”  pg 198  

In our reading, a math curriculum was talked about that, for a short time, replaced the track system (different levels for different students) in math in a school.  I read that this curriculum was highly successful and that students who were gifted could thrive with this curriculum as well as all students. So why not teach it to all students? Doing so would require training, but a superior plan would replace a less than adequate plan.  A school provided a few days of training/professional development and implemented it and erased the less than sufficient track system.  There was hope!

Three years later the curriculum was gone and the traditional tracking plan was reinstated.  The reason the curriculum was discontinued was because “ most of the teachers found the more conceptual curriculum too difficult to teach.”  Lack of training and professional development rears it’s ugly head, reform is rejected and tradition remains. This is just a  small example of poor teacher training and lack of professional development, an important piece of the big pie of education.

This doesn’t sound right to me.  The teachers should have had the support they needed to continue this conceptual way of teaching.  I’ve seen it over and over in my career.  When there is too little support for academic change that will ultimately make things better,      ( increase student achievement)it fails. It’s always easy to go back and do what you’ve always done instead of adding to your training or developing  new skills.  We really need a better way to ensure support for teachers as we continually reform our education system.  Change is inevitable and we need to have a way to keep up with the change as we strive for excellence and equity AND keep expert teachers and leaders in our education field.  

Countries like Finland, Korea and Singapore seem to have a great system for teacher education.  We can certainly learn from their system.  We would need to look over our current system(s) and evaluate where we are at in terms of the components listed in Darling-Hammonds book on page 198. Where can we improve with regards to supporting teaching?   How can we improve what is currently in place? We know these questions have been asked and answered in many ways over the life of education in our country.  Reform that is reformed that is reformed continually.  That is the nature of progress and improvement in a free society where every member has the right to be heard.  I don’t think the probability for scrapping our current system and implementing an entirely new one ( or copying one of a foreign country) exists.  (So let’s continue to make our system better 10 or 12 Wright Fellows at a time. JNext topic: efficiency!)

What matters? What can we learn?  If we want to have high achieving students, we need to ensure that highly trained and skilled teachers are available to teach them.  Excellent initial preparation in teaching, including an extensive practical experience followed by a strong mentoring component for a few years and a collaborative long term model would improve the state of education today.