Would your role as a teacher change, based on the socio-economic status of the students and the community?

I think it would be considerably more challenging to work in low SES communities. The statistics in our text are daunting. High absenteeism, high drop out rates, challenging family situations, parents with little time, inclination or resource to support education, major distractions and pitfalls in the community. As I said in a previous post, it feels like teachers in those communities are standing beneath an avalanche.

The first thing a teacher would need is committment. It is no small thing, teaching in that environment. It would necessary to be clear on why the teacher went to work each day. It would have to about the kids. Not the parents. Not the school system. Not the salary. The kids. And even that would be tricky. I think such a teacher would have to be prepared to lose regularly. There’s no way even the best teacher could successfully support each child through the year. So such a teacher would have to be prepared to go beyond their capabilities for each child and still lose often. Very hard. On the other, this is perhaps the noblest fight. Fighting for children who nobody else is fighting for. If such a teacher could endure the challenge and the failures, they’d have every right to sleep soundly, knowing that angels would be on their shoulders each day, cheering.

It is true that there are elements of these challenges in communities of any SES. But the density would be so much higher.

 In which kind of school – elementary, middle/junior high, or high school – do teachers have the most autonomy? The least autonomy? What implications does this have for you as a prospective teacher?

It seems to me that elementary school teachers have the most autonomy. Alone in the classroom, the playground and the lunchroom with their students day after day they are both isolated and autonomous. This suits me fine. When I worked in the corporate world I thrived in branch offices, far from authority, even far from my boss. Typically, I reported to somebody a 12 hour plane flight away and that was about the right distance. I knew that help was available and I was generally wise enough to seek it when necessary but day to day I was quite comfortable setting my own strategy. I can already see that my relationship to the core curriculum will be creative and somewhat unorthodox. But at the same time, I am extremely familiar with the concept that unorthodox only survives if it produces extraordinary orthodox results and remains in full communication.

I also am very excited by the prospect of spending a full school year with the same group of students, getting to know them in detail and helping each one proceed to the full measure of their ability. It seems to me that the relative independence, authority and autonomy of elementary school teachers supports that intention as well.

What pivotal historical influences do you think have most influenced today’s educational system?  How?  Why?

I agree with Sheri that NCLB is a huge influence on education today, but, for the sake of diversity, I’ll cite the common school movement as the foundation of today’s educational system in America. The common school movement established the principal that all children should have a certain kind of formal education and that the government had the responsibility and authority to act in that regard (Kauchak & Eggen, 2005). The nature and structure of our system today still reflects decisions and beliefs established then. Eduction is, by and large, public. It is controlled locally (by the municipalities and states) but with considerable interest and intervention from the federal government. It takes a certain European form, with core subjects, classes, bells and even the layout of classrooms reflecting the ideas of the 19th century.

For better or worse, something the size of the American educational system takes on a life of its own. Teachers have much invested in preserving the usefulness of the skills and experience they possess. Administrators are safest in a static system. Unions protect their own interests and, usually, the interests of the members. For parents, the public school system is the benchmark. The system makes it clear that children must conform to that system and parents seeking alternatives do so at great social risk. Politicians, of course, do what gets them elected and messing with teachers, administrators and parents is rarely a solid electoral strategy. Thus, changes when they happen generally come in the form of more money, more programs, and more demands for output. In the end, the only things that change are things that everybody can agree upon. Everybody will only agree when their individual needs are met. This is frequently not the change that meets the needs of the students.

To be fair, there is more to the current situation than the enormous inertia of a giant human system. There is also the breathtaking uncertainty of what exactly would be a superior system. Would a purely federal system be more efficient or perhaps one managed at the lowest political level, the municipality? Would more art work better, both as subject matter and as an approach to education? Or is more science (again in both meanings) the ticket for superior outcomes? Interestingly, the one thing that seems to have more or less universal agreement are the generalities of what should be taught. ELA, math and science, and a certain amount of civics/history, these are the core that seem beyond dispute. The rest (spirituality, physicality, artistic expression) are largely seen as optional at best, though significant elements of society value them highly. Likewise, there’s no significant pressure to revisit the military-industrial model of the school as established in the 19th century and still dominant today. The organization of students into classes, the rigidity of scheduling, teach/test cycles, classroom structure; all of these seem to be beyond debate in the mainstream.

Given the vast range of alternatives, known and unknown, it is impressive how powerfully the origins of American education echo today. 

Reference

Kauchak, P. & Eggen, P. (2005). Introduction to teaching: Becoming a professional (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

What personal attributes do you feel that teachers should possess to integrate both the art and the science of teaching?

Integrating art and science is one of the great challenges of Western Civilization. The world we have made is increasingly lopsided towards science. The guiding principal seems to be “More, better, faster”. Education continues to move towards science over art and is accelerating. The pressure is towards more time on ‘academics’, less time on the expressive arts (including physical activity and play). The pressure is on more time absorbing data, less time learning to creatively problem solve. Education is limiting towards the left-lobed bottleneck of teaching to tests. Thus the first quality a teacher needs to integrate art and science is an appreciation of the wholeness of knowledge.

Our society is reductionist. We don’t eat broccoli, we take pills with the specialized anti-oxidant properties of broccoli. We don’t drink orange juice, we take vitamin C powder to fight colds. We don’t feed our babies mother’s milk, we feed them ‘formula’. There is a strong and completely arrogant belief that everything can be made better by breaking it down into component parts and isolating the ‘important stuff’. Integrating art and science requires moving against this trend, towards wholeness. Thus, teachers seeking to integrate art and science in how they teach (and what they teach) must have or develop the ability to see the ‘whole’. The first whole to be seen is their objective: to fill their students with the love and desire for knowledge. They must start from there and build their days, weeks and year around the skeleton of joyful learning and the core knowledge appropriate for the class or age. The skeleton should be filled out with wholeness containing the essences of the core learning and the excitement and wonder to make that core learning take place in a context of whole knowledge and fun. This is no small thing. It takes the courage to believe children will absorb the core knowledge from the full mass. It takes the knowledge to find whole knowledge that excites the students. And it take skill to present that is such a way as to appeal to all the different kinds of learners and to tease out the core knowledge from the mass. Finally, it takes the energy to go beyond the curriculum, to create a context and world in which the curriculum can become a valuable, instructive element. 

So to summarize, teachers need specific skills regarding teaching and learning, general knowledge of exciting ‘whole’ subjects, specific knowledge of the core curriculum, the energy to weave them together in a way that captivates the learners and transmits the required data, the courage to do this in the face of a reductionist system and the trust that this art of is an equal and essential partner with the science.