Saturday, October 15, 2011

Does anyone know what to do with education?

As a teacher, it gets so very confusing. There is the very popular philosophy that has been going around for a number of years (perhaps decades) that the problem in education is "bad" teachers and they should find a way to get the rid of them. Therefore, "the powers that be" keep shifting things around to accommodate their objective of blaming the problem on bad (ineffective) teachers. But does anyone really know what the problem is and where the blame should be? Because that unanswered question still persists, teachers are daily faced with different conflicting information and strategies from a very confused hierarchy that really does not know what to do. So, at any given meeting, teachers are told something quite different from a previous meeting and there is no explanation (or a made-up explanation) for the reason. For example, we were told that we should follow the Pacing Guide to teach our students and that we should consider it as the "bible" for our content to instruct students. So we did, for months. A week before the test, the administrators informed us that, "oooops, the test will not be aligned with the Pacing Guide!!!" What is a teacher to do?! You give the teacher a set of instructions to follow because, of course, you believe that the teacher is not capable of doing it on his or her own. He's ineffective. Then when the teacher follows the instructions the system gives him, the system changes its mind at the last minute. But, the teacher is still to be blamed. That's why I believe that the problem is not about having bad teachers, it is that students are not studying at home. The system keeps looking for the source of the problem in the teachers when they might be missing the mark right in front of them. That's why I created the Royalty Approach to Education (RATE) and the Royalty Approach Weekly (RAW) to help solve that problem. See them at www.RoyaltyApproach.com.

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