A Ramble: What are we doing well as educators, as parents? What are we really helping our students and children learn through, and beyond, academics?
There are many ongoing debates in education right now. One of them that seems to pit teachers against parents and teachers against teachers, leaving students somewhere in between, is the debate over the value of homework. For that matter, there are plenty of conversations as to how class time is best spent, and how curriculum, instruction, and assessment can be utilized, in tandem, to guide students towards the ultimate potential. Sounds great! Sounds great?
In order to reach every student’s potential, units and lessons should be a combination of differentiated, personalized, and individualized (check out my presentation in the resources section). Learning should be engaging, active, rigorous, and relevant. Along with content, students should be taught executive functioning and social-emotional skills that will help form learners and citizens that will succeed in school and in society at large. No small task, of course. Is it possible for teachers to plan, implement, and assess in classrooms that are truly teaching and reaching students in a way that are society is expecting? How is there time in a 24-hour day, 7-day week?
Of course, my statements are slightly hyperbolic. No one can, or should, work 24-hours in a day, every single day of the week. And no one can possibly expect every lesson to be as described above. However, on the flip side, it is exactly the type of pressure educators are putting on ourselves, and the type of pressure that is driving educational movements today, in and out of school buildings. So, the questions arise- how are educators using time? How should we, as teachers, plan for students to spend their time out of school? How should we, as parents, expect our children to spend their time out of school?
It isn’t an exaggeration that time is limited. We are only given so many hours in a day, and so many weeks in a year. Knowing we cannot literally use all of the time available, how do we best use the time provided. I’d like to give my opinion at this point in my career, at this point in my life, and at this point in the year. I say it this way because I know that experience has changed my views. I also believe that as the year ends, and I am a reflective person looking towards a fresh start of sorts, I want to give another caveat to my point of view.
I encourage dialogue via the comments section below, and also via the social media outlet from which you may have been directed here. Discourse is a way to learn.
The role of adults is to help guide children, to guide students towards becoming educated and productive members of whatever group and society in which they choose to live. Teaching our students and our own children to manage their own time is important, a skill, I believe, most people do not naturally learn on their own. We like to say that we can’t teach intrinsic motivation, but wish that all people had it, of all ages. I think we want students to be intrinsically motivated so that true learning can take place. When learning is authentic and genuine, time, and its management is often not a factor, only a constraint by our school system or our families’ busy schedules. It’s a dichotomy we need to teach our children to manage, for better or for worse. We need to help guide our students to love learning for its own sake through instruction that facilitates it and we need to explicitly teach time management.
Do we teach time management skills through the mundane necessities that often come in life, but we are wanting our children to experience less and less? Or do we teach them to manage their time and their energies to focus on what is priority at the moment, and what is fun and engaging? How do we balance learning for its own sake, with the stark reality that there are tasks that do need to be accomplished, and accomplished well, for their own sake, for the means to the ends, and also for learning how to be members of whatever productive society and culture in which we are happy and healthy participating members. Teachers and parents need to work together for the sake of a next generation that, unfortunately and fortunately, have so much more to learn, and can learn in ways that are beyond exciting and beyond fun. Students of today are able to have almost a customized education, of sorts (an oversimplification, best understood by knowing the difference between differentiation, individualization, and personalization), one that many parents are demanding, and schools are trying to find balance to figure ways to accommodate. However, is the push to find the potential in every child, every lesson, of everyday, leading us astray of skills that may be necessary to help facilitate learning, one of them being the management of time, and with it comes the management of mental energy? All of the new trends in education today, and all of the debate over whether homework is needed, or what type of homework should be given, or when school should start and what students should be doing while in school, may all come down to how well are we, as adults, helping to explicitly teach our students how to realistically manage their time and energy in a world that is 24 hours a day, 365 days a week in their demands.
I encourage dialogue via the comments section below, and also via the social media outlet from which you may have been directed here. Discourse is a way to learn.
Talking Math 