blog 5

On Monday in the NBC series EducationNation, one brave young teacher from Brooklyn questioned the idea of tenure for teachers. She said that in order to teach her largely hispanic students effectively, she needed a longer school day or an extra hour on Saturday. Her union contract barred her from this measure. NBC emphasized that this was a shining example of a teacher employing student-centered instruction and a bombshell thrown into the traditionalist camp. Business as usual will no longer suffice. More and more we hear that overhauling education is a matter of national security.

Wow.

With this daunting and exciting task of entering of whole new world of education in mind, this chapter was really refreshing. I went back and drew a picture of the sun on the first page of chapter 3. Williams illustrates that it is not what we do, i.e. the process approach, but in the way of doing. Two different teachers can be giving the exact same assignment and both administering the process approach with very different results. Whether or not the students are able to improve as writers or even feel engaged lies in implementation. This point seems like plain common sense, but sometimes when we do an activity over and over again and we have been using that method for twenty years examining the way in which we do it falls in favor of thoughtless mechanized routine. After all, once we have those nice, shiny handouts printed from the previous year, will we be willing to edit and reprint three hundred new ones?
The idea of teacher as coach would definitely be something I would like to implement in my own classroom. I do not remember the name of many of my teachers from high school, but I do recall all of my sports coaches. If I think about the approach to coaching sports, very little time is given to lectures. Even when plays were learned, they were often interactive, starting in slow motion and then proceeding to game pace. For drills to improve speed or ball quickness for example, we were almost always broken into small groups. My most memorable sports seasons are definitely junior varsity where everyone was allowed playing time. Varsity was too competitive. Williams points out our preference to cater to the highest-performing students. This was always my experience in varsity sports and often I was one of the star players. If we are not going to be professional athletes, why wasn’t everyone allowed equal playing time? Low performing students in the classroom may work just as hard as our star performers. If a student takes the time to revise their paper four times even with minimal improvement, this is a great accomplishment for both student and teacher