You learn your best when you are comfortable with yourself
and have some self-awareness, as well as the ability to self-regulate. If you
are struggling at home, you are thinking about those problems all of the time
and are, therefore, not present to your learning. However, imagine this: What
if in school you learned to know yourself, the kind of person you are, the kind
of learner you are, your emotional triggers, strategies to help you cope in
difficult situations, ways of expressing yourself to get your needs met, where to share your troubles? If your class role-played problems to discover multiple solutions imagine how socially savvy you’d be! You’d be confident, self-aware, and able
to see the big picture, act as a leader, and take care of yourself. And then
you’d be in a place where you could do your best learning. There are some curriculums and sources for this kind of learning already out there: Responsive Classroom, Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility
What if children got to decide what, when, and how they learn?
Meet Logan LaPlate, a kid in Colorado, who is hackschooling his education. He decides what to learn, how to learn, and when to learn. He does research on the internet. He takes field trips in his areas of interest. He creates internships for himself. He spends one day per week in nature. This kid has it down!
"The concept is that education, like everything else, is open to being hacked or improved, not just by working within the current system, but by going outside the educational establishment to find better ways to accomplish the same goals. The most innovative entrepreneurs are people who are able to hack the status quo and create something completely new. The concept is summarized in this quote by Buckminster Fuller, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.""
What if ALL teachers had certification in general AND special education?
Can you imagine a classroom where all teachers have a "toolbox" to work effectively with all kinds of learners? Teachers who can read a child and know what strategy to use in a particular moment are rare. In my experience they are not the teachers who have had the most experience, rather they are the teachers who had a variety of experiences and time to reflect on them and share them. We live in a world where everyone, including typically-developing children, needs a little extra help at least once in their lives. Teacher training programs, in essence, Masters in Education programs, give teachers 2 important pieces of becoming a skilled teacher for all populations. In both general and special education programs, the 2 components are taking classes (ie. reading and learning within a teacher-community), and real world experience, often called field work or student teaching, where the student shadows a master teacher and gets first-hand experience in a particular educational setting. I am here to invent the possibility that there's only ONE license and it is a combination of BOTH general and special education. If this were the case, all teachers would have field work from a special education setting. They would have seen master teachers in action, tried out lessons as well as created their own in a master teacher's classroom with feedback from that master teacher, and networked with master teachers through email and social media, and develop relationships with them so that years down the road when they are confused about a child they have a network of professional colleagues to connect with for ideas, resources, collaboration, and help. Special education teacher training programs differ from general education ones in that the field of special education is aware of and celebrates the whole child. As a teacher in a special education program you learn about all kinds of child development, what it looks like in the child, in the home, in the classroom, and what kinds of strategies teachers can use to reach all students. How invaluable! This is how we can meet every child's needs. This is how we can best prepare teachers.
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