What makes a good education? Some would say the quality of the teacher is the number one determining factor in a child’s success. What about the learning environment? How many kids are in the classroom would certainly affect the ability of the teacher to relay information and plan activities. Curriculum must also be considered. What are we teaching students and, more importantly, why? How should information be transmitted to the students? Most educators agree that it is really the home environment and parental involvement that determine a child’s success in school, but we cannot hope to effect much change in those areas. Concentrating on the categories we can improve, I will outline my beliefs on education.
Most of the educational workload falls squarely on the shoulders of the teacher. The curriculum dictates what he or she should teach, but what should the teacher know? Mortimer J. Adler states that a teacher should have a broad and general education followed by clinical apprenticeship under an exemplary field teacher (1982). I agree completely. I believe we focus too much on pedagogy and not enough on the cultivation of the minds of future teachers. When you train to become a doctor, you spend the first two years learning the facts and procedures of your field, the last two years you spend working with patients in person under the direction of teaching doctors. Why should this approach not work with teacher candidates? They could complete two to three years of general knowledge and procedure followed by a full year of teaching with great teachers in the area. I am sure I would gain more teaching experience by being in a classroom everyday for a whole year versus the protracted and disjointed method of observations we currently employ.
As for general education, a teacher doesn’t have to know everything but they should be knowledgeable. When I was little, I thought my teacher knew everything. I was confident that if I asked her a question, she would know the answer. From where I stand now, that is a frightening prospect. I want to at least have an idea of an answer and encourage their inquisitiveness. A wide and liberal understanding of many subjects can provide me with the resources to do so. There are many roles teachers must fulfill during their working day: explorer, scientist, linguist, author, historian, psychologist, and many more. The best teacher will be a student at heart, leading the class along the adventure they take together.
Students need a more prescriptive learning environment in order to reach their full potential. I believe that every child has an area of giftedness waiting to be discovered. Every child also has at least one weakness that needs to be uncovered and managed. This reflects the views of Dr. Mel Levine. Students should be evaluated for learning deficiencies such as trouble transferring short-term memory to long-term memory and problematic disorganization. Weaknesses like these are not classified as learning disabilities, but they certainly keep children from doing their best. If students understand their own learning roadblocks they can work with teachers and parents to effectively manage these obstacles( 2002). This gives a child not only responsibility for his own education, but the satisfaction of achieving some control over himself. Empowered learners can more easily become self-motivated adults.
How can teachers with classes of 23 to 25 students individually assess all of their learners’ needs? They can’t. Classroom sizes should be lowered to increase individual achievement. When a child is struggling in a subject area, the first suggestion most experts offer is to hire a tutor. If a teacher only had 12 to 15 children in her classroom, she could provide that extra attention. Less instructional time would be spent on crowd control and could be used towards enriching activities.
With a smaller classroom size comes the opportunity for more individualized curricula. A teacher could easily profile students using the methods of Howard Gardner and identify their dominant learning styles ( 2004). My son, Elijah, is a strong kinesthetic and rhythmic learner. When he practices memorizing a line of text, we have found that if he does jumping jacks he will recall much more information. He also memorizes his times tables by singing them. My older son, Joseph, is more visually talented and learned his tables by drawing his own flash cards. Gardner also described teaching children disciplinary styles instead of a multitude of facts (2004). I prefer this approach because once you have learned to think like a writer, you can apply your skill by writing in many different styles. Once you learn and practice the scientific method, adapting the information of science becomes easier. This doesn’t mean students don’t need to know factual information, but using disciplinary practices moves them higher up Bloom’s Taxonomy and keeps them there. There is no other time in a person’s life when he has to know, retain, and recall as much information as he does in his school-age years. Why not give students the skills to understand and apply different categories of information instead of continuously testing their rote memory?
Providing children with more indivualized educational experiences will increase their knowledge and motivation. Every student brings to school a completely different learning puzzle. We must provide teachers with the broad education and concentrated field training necessary to give knowledgeable and specific instruction. By reducing class sizes we can support both the student and the teacher’s goals. If education’s purpose is to prepare children for their future lives, then we must stop reinforcing skills that will not be applicable to them, such as rote memorization and regurgitation. Our future generations should have their own unique gifts fostered and developed by teaching them to discover learning can be creative and even enjoyable.
References
Adler, Mortimer J. (1982, July). “The Paidea Proposal: Rediscovering the Essence of Education”. American School Board Journal.
Gardner, Howard. (2004). Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach. New York:Basic Books.
Levine, Mel. (2002). A Mind at a Time. New York: Simon and Schuster.
