What if teacher-training involved public speaking and audience engagement?

What if teacher-training involved public speaking and audience engagement? 

This is one of the most powerful TED talks I've ever seen regarding our current state of education and teacher-training. For years I've been advocating for teachers to have training in how to understand, respond to, and react to their audience- their students. I think it a huge disservice to students when teachers aren't excited, engaged, and animated about content. This guy says teachers should watch rappers and preachers and take notes on how they engage their audiences. Amen.

What if all products had to be disassemble-able so they could have multiple lives?

What if we exposed children to the idea that resources are finite, and products become obsolete too quickly? What if we challenged children to create products from their previous counterparts? What if all products had to be disassemble-able so they could have multiple lives? Wait a minute! Children naturally do this! They takes things apart and put them back together and take them apart and make new things! This is a huge conversation that, I believe, we should be having with children. Let's inspire them to create not just from what we already have, but with the idea that what they create will not be an end in itself.

In this video they explore the idea that products should be made in a way that make them easily disassemble-able so they can go back to their manufacturer at the end of their life to be reused in new incarnations. I like the idea of companies re-hacking their own products. 

What if students engaged in their own community re-purposing, co-creating their environments through street art and getting to know their neighbors?

What if students engaged in their own community re-purposing, co-creating their environments through street art and getting to know their neighbors? 

I am so inspired by Candy Chang. She creates community forums in unused public spaces that bring people and ideas closer together. What if students were exposed to the following projects and challenged to engage their communities through unused public spaces? 

Here are my Candy Change favorites: 

Before I Die is probably Candy's most widespread project. It turns the side of an abandoned building into a chalkboard of wishes, dreams, and bucket lists. The project gained so much popularity that Candy designed stencil kits, in different languages, that she sends around the world, upon request, so that "Before I Die" walls can be recreated elsewhere. What a way to share with and inspire your neighbors and motivate yourself to follow your dreams! 

Neighborland is "an online/public installation tool for civic collaboration. Organizations can ask questions to their community about the places they care about. These questions are tied to real world projects so residents’ ideas and feedback will lead to change." Say what? The people have a voice? And someone wants to listen? Hell yeah! This project aims to solve local issues through community feedback. One example asked for ways to make a particular street safer. 

Community Chalkboards "provide residents with a free and accessible platform to publicize events, post jobs, ask questions, and self-organize... Inspired by a community chalkboard in Liberia by Alfred Sirleaf." What a way to repurpose the chalkboard! In small communities, particularly where not everyone has internet access, a community events chalkboard is a brilliant way to gather your neighbors and share. 

Post It Notes For Neighbors

This installation consisted of a wall of post-it notes that were pre-stamped with fill-in-the-blank statements about the number of rooms in your apartment and how much you pay in rent. I love that this installation seeks information that neighbors are too shy to ask each other but really want to know. This was inspired by the Illegal Art "To Do" project, which created a mural of post-it notes in the shape of the words "TO DO" so that passersby could share their daily "to do" lists. After all, we all have them, right? 

What if schools engaged students in addressing community needs?

What if students were coached through design projects and taught how to choose materials and use power tools to alleviate an immediate social need like housing for the homeless?  

At Project H, children have built a 2,000-square-foot farmers market structure, iconic downtown landmarks, farmstands, playgrounds, school gardens, an obstacle course, public chicken coops, a school library, and a tiny home (for the homeless that is being made now). This purpose-driven project is engaging 9-17 year-olds in social responsibility through creatively solving current issues. And the students are learning physical as well as social skills along the way. 

What if school curriculums were focused around the communities they serve? What if there were no cookie-cutter curriculums, and instead students, teachers, and administration worked together to choose areas of study based on community need. Think of the impact! Think of the teamwork, resourcefulness, and learning that could happen! Think of the relationship that would be fostered between the school and community! Think of the changing role of teacher from a provider of information to a facilitator of social change. 

What if schools were noisy, open-air laboratories with no set schedules?

What if schools were open-air laboratories with no set schedules? What if there were no walls and students could come and go freely, attending to their emotional needs? What if some of the students' needs were anticipated like tree-climbing and the ability to dangle your legs from high places? What if nature and physical activity were built into your school day, and your school? What if you had to climb a tree to get to class and take a slide out of it? 

In his TED talk, The Best Kindergarten You've Ever Seen, Takaharu Tezuka reminds us that children can become anxious in silent, sterile environments. And they thrive when given space and some stimulating background noise. He argues for intentionally-designed child-centered spaces that meet the needs of students while also creating a safe space. Think about it: a circular school so kids can run and run without leaving the school. Brilliant! 

Something else of note is that instead of a sink in the corner of the room, Tezuka puts them in the middle, allowing space for many children to use it at once, thus expanding the utility of the sink. It becomes not just a place for washing up, but a place for play, chatter, and the talk-around-the-water-cooler social phenomenon. 

What if teachers were the most prepared people to do the teaching?

As a country we spend more money per child than any of the top performing countries in the world. When I say "top performing" I am referring to countries that focus on critical thinking, creative problem solving, and persistence as the gateway to deeper learning in academic areas like reading, writing, and mathematics. In these countries, while spending less per student, teachers have class sizes that are noticeably larger than here in the States and they have considerably less outside support for student's with special needs. And the students are still outperforming ours. How is this happening with less money and less individualized support? The reason is teacher training. In Finland, which is so often talked about as a model for better education, teachers spend 6 years training!!!! Teach for America and NY Teaching Fellows churn out teachers in less than 2 years and place them in extremely difficult schools. No wonder there are crazy high teacher attrition rates! In some countries teachers get a Masters in their intended field so they can become experts, and then they go to a teacher-training school for 2 years. In order to get licensed, teachers write persuasive arguments about how they would solve hypothetical classroom problems, instead of taking 3-hour multiple choice tests about content that's often not even related to what they'll be teaching. What if instead of pouring money into students we poured it into teacher training? 

What if great, progressive graduate programs got some state funding to train more teachers?

What if a degree from a "critical-thinking school" meant a higher salary? Unfortunately, spending $1.3B on smaller class size or more professional development for teachers is not hitting the target. Teachers need to be prepared BEFORE they are in the trenches. Teaching is an incredibly difficult and time-consuming job. And it should be. As a teacher you usually have more than 20 children's lives in your hands for 180 days. And that's often more time than they are spending with their families. Being able to have that large an impact on someone's life is a huge responsibility and not something an hour of coaching once a week in a subject area is going to improve that much. Teachers need to learn how to teach critical thinking and creative problem solving. Not better reading. What leads to better reading are children who can come up with strategies on their own instead of being given them by the teacher. What's needed are way more restrictions to become a teacher, with teacher assessments that match those high expectations. If we want our students to do better we need our teachers to be better.

What if teachers were fired for not doing their job well?

In most professions employees receive warnings that lead to getting fired when they do not perform their job to a certain level of standards. Imagine that teachers who fail their students by ignoring IEPs, playing favorites, grading inconsistently from their colleagues or the Common Core Standards, got fired. When students and parents complain enough, in the current system, teachers who are a year away from retirement can be convinced to retire early. This only accounts for a very small portion of poor-performing teachers. What if teachers had to always do their job well in order to keep their job? What if teachers couldn't hide behind tenure with poor-performance? What if teachers worked hard because they had to? What if teachers didn't have unlimited job security?What if tenure didn't exist?

What if parents spent more time, not money, on their children?

What if there was a way for parents to spend more time with their children? What if more parents worked from home? What if more parents got time off from work to volunteer in their child's school or chaperone field trips? What if being a parent was socially viewed as a priority over your job? What if your job recognized, appreciated, and allowed for this too? 

What if social and emotional learning are seen as just as important as academic curriculums?

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.

What if children were taught this?