This is a question often asked of me, when I am conducting creativity workshops or talking about passionate teaching. In fact I was asked this just a couple of days ago when I was at the Dexter Schools talking about 21st Century Learning and Creativity. This issues comes up most when I am in India where the magnitude of the problems is just so large that scalability is always an issue.
My response to this typically has been quite straightforward. I say that I can’t think that big. I have a congenital defect that renders me incapable of thinking of projects on a large scale. I cannot comprehend states and nations. I can barely comprehend a district. What I am most comfortable with is one classroom. What this does is color my way of thinking about innovation, pushing me towards the position that change can be effected one classroom at a time. When I teach my summer courses as a part of the MAET program, I usually have 25 students, a number I can comprehend. My goal is to touch these 25, to connect with them, and to raise within them a passion for using technology to teach subject matter. If I manage to touch even a fifth of them and they go back to their classes inspired to do something new and better, hey I have succeeded.
This is not to say that policies don’t matter that social change can’t happen. Just that I am personally incapable of thinking in grand generalities. I have a feeling that my skepticism regarding large scale efforts comes from my deep suspicion that visions and plans mutate in often detrimental ways when they move out of the local. So I stay in the local, and frankly that is good enough for me.
Now Scott may think that this is a cop-out and not necessarily a response to his question, but sadly that is the best I can give. The Ron Clark Academy works well where it does. Just training a bunch of teachers in the techniques used there and asking them to implement it in their classrooms will not necessarily translate into better student achievement. For instance, I am not sure that the Ron Clark approach would work in India, a country with very different cultural and historical expectations of what teaching and learning could/should be. So I choose to withhold judgment and work harder with the people I know I can influence.
I am coming to believe that long-term change can ONLY be effected one student at a time, one teacher at a time, and therefore, one classroom at a time. That perspective has helped me to consider more carefully both the purposes of what I am teaching student teachers and the pedagogies I am using to do so. As a result, I have been working hard to reframe and refocus what I am doing in ways that keep the individual more clearly in view.
With that said, one of the knotty problems I am currently wrestling with is how to support students in feeling comfortable experimenting with approaches that are so contrary to their prior experiences as learners and to their present images of teachers. Scaling that up to the mentor teachers who reinforce many of those prior experiences and conceptions of teaching/learning is an even more daunting task.
My experiences in your class were quite antithetical to the rest of my schooling. Your approach gave me “vuja de experiences” that expanded the depth and breadth of my understanding, stimulated an appetite for further learning, and shifted my perspective in powerful ways. I’m wondering if you ever encounter students who resist that, and what approaches you take when they do?
P.S. I would be curious to know what characteristics or criteria you use to discern/determine those who are most likely to be receptive to your influence?
Thank you for your kind words. And, as to your whether students resist it – some do but again they usually have figured the system out well enough to know that this is just one more course with a faculty member setting weird goals and the trick is to do whatever is needed to get through the semester
Ron Clark Academy loses 25% of the students that they handpick, if this was a public school we would scream for it to close. Their intentions are good enough but they never are recognized for their high student and staff turnover. Only one teacher, other than Ron Clark, is from the original staff and she is the co-founder.
If someone was to truly look inside for the true facts they would see a very different story that the fable that has been told.
October 5th, 2009 at 1:42 am
I am coming to believe that long-term change can ONLY be effected one student at a time, one teacher at a time, and therefore, one classroom at a time. That perspective has helped me to consider more carefully both the purposes of what I am teaching student teachers and the pedagogies I am using to do so. As a result, I have been working hard to reframe and refocus what I am doing in ways that keep the individual more clearly in view.
With that said, one of the knotty problems I am currently wrestling with is how to support students in feeling comfortable experimenting with approaches that are so contrary to their prior experiences as learners and to their present images of teachers. Scaling that up to the mentor teachers who reinforce many of those prior experiences and conceptions of teaching/learning is an even more daunting task.
My experiences in your class were quite antithetical to the rest of my schooling. Your approach gave me “vuja de experiences” that expanded the depth and breadth of my understanding, stimulated an appetite for further learning, and shifted my perspective in powerful ways. I’m wondering if you ever encounter students who resist that, and what approaches you take when they do?
October 5th, 2009 at 1:44 am
P.S. I would be curious to know what characteristics or criteria you use to discern/determine those who are most likely to be receptive to your influence?
October 6th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Thank you for your kind words. And, as to your whether students resist it – some do but again they usually have figured the system out well enough to know that this is just one more course with a faculty member setting weird goals and the trick is to do whatever is needed to get through the semester
October 14th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Ron Clark Academy loses 25% of the students that they handpick, if this was a public school we would scream for it to close. Their intentions are good enough but they never are recognized for their high student and staff turnover. Only one teacher, other than Ron Clark, is from the original staff and she is the co-founder.
If someone was to truly look inside for the true facts they would see a very different story that the fable that has been told.