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Tomorrow, I’ll be spending the entire day with my faculty colleagues at the VCU School of Education. We’ll be spending the day “visioning”; a full day of strategic planning. I believe we’ll be tackling big questions such as: who are we? what do we do? what should we do? where should we be?
I’m constantly mulling these sorts of questions, but to aid my thinking, I ask you:
What would you like the faculty of a School of Education to explore as part of a visioning process? What should we be considering?
Thanks in advance for your help!
photo credit: rachaelvoorhees
First understanding: What is the purpose of school? I think required reading for this question is Peter Hoeg’s novel, “Borderliners.”
Next question: How can a socially reproductive process, the monopoly on granting Education PhDs by Education PhDs ever lead to anything but a socially reproductive education system? Who should be teaching teachers? How should they? Bonus question, Can you lecture on differentiated instruction?
Real issue: US schools work – always have “worked” – for one third of students, but that one third comprises almost 100% of school and college of education faculties. No wonder nothing changes. How do we shift these facts? How do you – education faculty – begin to hear voices other than your own?
How do schools of ed prepare for preK – 12 “schools of the future”? What will “college” look like when high schools change? What will high schools look like when middle schools change? etc. What role will schools of education play? How can schools of education inform Board of Education structures such as licensure and curriculum standards? How must these structures change and what role will schools of ed play?
First to the Ed Tech department, then to the College of Education…what are you doing to reach out to other departments in the University to help them begin to think about their students’ use of technology and how that technology can be applied pedagogically to improve the learning process? From a student perspective, I truly wish the departments were more cross-disciplinary (even within the College of Ed). This article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?_r=2 seemed to spark some conversation at UF. Questions to ponder: What impact does OER have on our programs and curriculum? Are we contributing to OER? If so, how? If not, should we? How can we use social networking and other technologies to promote our programs AND serve our students? These are probably things you’ve already thought about. Wishing you a successful and productive strategic planning process!
You should be:
a) determining what the desired condition or state of affairs should be for your target group. You hopefully know who your target group(s) is/are.
b) then agreeing on what the barriers are in front of attaining the desired condition.
c) finally develop programs/initiatives that explicitly knock down the barriers. Measure the effectiveness.
d) lather, rinse, repeat.
Some good advice above, Jon. My only 2 cents worth is to focus on the future and not the past. We do not need a School of Education that prepares school administrators for the Twentieth (or earlier) Century. What will make schools relevant in a digital age and how can SOE prepare the leaders for that relevant future?
How do we teach teachers to collaborate, to reach beyond the walls of their classrooms and consider their mission as part of a community?
And how do we help teachers with leadership skills?
And how do we view working beyond the walls of our own classrooms a natural part of what we do?
I agree, a clear mission is important. I think of SLA when I mention this!
I don’t have any deep message or lofty vision. I just made a mistake when I took classes and realized how much it benefited me. I didn’t pay attention to the schedule of classes that I was supposed to take and ended up taking my internship far too soon. What that meant is while everything was theoretical to other teachers, it was practical to me. Pre-service teachers need to do more that discuss and observe. This may have changed for your school, but the new teachers I have worked with still come into the classroom with no practical experience. Some haven’t even had a practicum. Their first try is alone with 120+ students depending on them. Their only hope is a good mentor.
To me the purpose of education is to make the world a better place. It’s that simple and that hard.
I also have to preface any comments by saying I’m not all that interested in supporting concepts like NCLB (even though as a Canadian it’s different, but the whole “data driven” schtick is universal it seems) I’m interested in what I know to be good for kids.
As someone who works with teacher and pre-service teachers, it’s largely about helping them unlearn many things. This is actually harder in many ways for pre-service teacher because they had success in school, it worked for them. Many teachers realize that the current system is flawed. They aren’t sure how to fix it but they know it’s not right.
So all that rambling is to say, try and envision what’s good for kids sans that current notions about school. I realize that most want to find ways to exist in the current model but I think you need to start with the ideal and work backwards.
Honestly, I would start here. http://bengrey.com/blog/2008/11/what-if/
Once you’ve answered the questions there, the next would be, “How do we build a learning experience for our candidates that allows them to leave actualizing our goal for education?”
As an institution, we must think about what kind of learning opportunities we want our future teachers to afford their future students. Honestly, I think most preparatory “methods” courses miss their mark entirely as they focus on how to teach finite skills and content. Instead, they should be focusing on how to teach students how to learn.
The challenge will come when you realize how many different people have different goals for education. And that, I believe, is where we should begin.
Thanks for providing this opportunity for some input. In so doing, you’re modeling the first thing I suggest for consideration, which is fostering the ability in future teachers to develop trusting and collaborative relationships. Future teachers need to be able to win the trust of their students and colleagues, and to use that trust to advance collaborative learning in the classroom and beyond. There should be a focus on developing these skills both in face-to-face and digital settings. I also hope there’s some discussion about preparing teachers to deal with the tension between standardization and personalization. Two ways to build that capacity that I hope to see enhanced are: first, helping teachers to learn how to apply research methodology to their practice; second, helping teachers to learn about the brain, specifically with regard to its development and the scientific basis for sensory processing, learning, and memory. Finally, I hope that there will be some discussion on building distance education skills in future teachers – by this I mean both learning to use technology and learning how to facilitate student learning in asynchronous, non-face-to-face environments.
Now that I’ve had a bit more time to reflect on this, I’d like to throw in an addendum or three. Once you’ve established your institution’s accepted goal for education, you can get a bit more pragmatic.
1. You probably need to settle this issue as a group. http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-03-04-core-knowledge_N.htm How much content should we be teaching vs. how much skill focus should we maintain? Personally, I think this article is far too polarizing. The skills help students reach the content. The tricky part is, however, how much of each should we include/address? What is the foundational content we think students need to have? Is there even such a thing?
2. How should we assess students? Huge question, but an important one. How do we measure how well students are learning? Formative, summative, mastery, instructional, and all other flavors of assessment should be worked through to help teachers get beyond the monolithic, scantron assessments being employed in too many classrooms with far too much frequency. And this is a great opportunity for you to get all “data are…” on everyone.
3. Grading. How do we report what the kids know when they know it? Huge issue, but yet another if we don’t start addressing it now, when will we?
And if you get through all of that in the first couple hours, just play that “if I were an animal, which one would I be” or some other series of excellent icebreakers we all love to hate.
Jon, Wow. pretty good response rate for a few hours!
Economics.
That is, don’t know what you all will want, but above all, I would like educators to know more about economics. It would help in so many ways.
For example, if I ask in a forum about charters, several writers will immediately excoriate ‘profit’ as the source of all evil, greedy corporations as sucking the lifeblood of society.
‘Twould be nice if someone asked teachers who made these profits. Say, for example, the profits made on nearly one trillion in teachers retirement funds? At ten percent a year, that’s 100 billion dollars in profits collected by teachers, per annum.
They might learn something of pricing, so they could understand how collective bargaining actually pushes down their pay.
They might study supply/demand so they could disabuse their charges of so many common myths that hold people back and devolve discussion of solutions.
To this we might add history, as college grads in general are woefully short of it. Econ would make a good discussion for one day, though.
There are so many issues to consider when it comes to institutional visioning, but what has been on my mind lately are the concepts embedded in Davd Perkins’ book, Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching can Transform Education. I think that would be a great place to begin. Many departments are quite good at them already. Schools of education, sadly, are not always among them… and they really need to be. I won’t rehash the book here, but here are some titbits:
http://tr.im/l85Z
http://www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470384522.html
This is a tough topic, given the balance between the vision and the reality. As to what faculty should be exploring, I would have to say that I agree with Lisa Nielsen’s post on this topic. She has some great insights on a recent blog post: http://is.gd/o0Qk