Putting the I in change
To often I hear educators make remarks about change. Either about that it’s too much, too fast, too often, or the more famous one, “Here we go again.”
For some reason, some educators do not see the I in change. The school can change, teaching can change, students can change, as long as I don’t have to change.
How do we put the I in change?
Should we even be trying?
Change is difficult, change is uncomfortable and honestly we, as humans, don’t like change!
But we are in the change business. We change minds, we change knowledge, we change attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. If we are in the change business why are we as a profession so unwilling to change?
Change our teaching, change our thinking, change our outlook. Why as a profession (not all but still the majority) of educators do we have a hard time putting I in change?
Do we need more PD time? Do we need to make reflection a priority? How do we put the I in change?
The issue I’m having with this of course is that we say students need to have the skill of learn, unlearn and relearn. Are we teaching our teachers to do the same?
Do our teacher know how to learn? I know we hope they do…but remember when we were in school we were never taught to unlearn and relearn. We were taught to learn…..period!
We’re good at learning, we’re not so good at unlearning and relearning.
We grew up in a era when you just learned how to do something and that was it….you went off and did it your whole life. No need to change, everything stays the same. Case in point…how many of you have only ever worked in education? Professionally I mean, not that summer job you did in high school. I mean a real professional job that you lived off of. (I never have. I only know education…but someday I hope I can be a professional in another field)
I’ve been thinking about this after talking to some teachers who wanted to know when the next release of Mac’s OSX was coming out.
“I don’t want to waste my time to learn something that I just have to relearn anyway.”
The problem is you still have to learn it, and some of those skills will be transferable. But yes, you will have to unlearn and relearn. We want to just learn how to do something and then not have to do it again.
That’s not the way it works in the 21st Century. You can’t buy the same cell phone, the same TV and remote, the same DVD player because they go out of date. You cannot rely on data you gathered three years ago without researching to see if there is updated more accurate data out there.
We live in a time of constant learning and if you are not constantly learning you are becoming extinct.
Find a way to help those around you put the I in change.
I agree in general, Jeff; but I also think it might be helpful if someone was to actually say what the ‘change’ that teachers need to go through actually is. Also, let’s not forget that teachers don’t actually have a huge choice in what they teach or how they teach it; their approaches are constrained by the attitudes and actions of managers, administrators, examination boards, universities. It’s hard to ‘change’ in a classroom with 1 computer, answering to a management team who have other priorities than implementing new technologies whilst trying to deliver a curriculum written in 1982 by someone a million miles away which leads to the paper-and-pen examination upon which university entry depends (or whatever). Teachers need to change, sure, but until the big players start to reassess their priorities, nothing will REALLY change!
The Change teachers need to go through:
Understanding that no longer are they in control of the information.
Also, let’s not forget that teachers don’t actually have a huge choice in what they teach or how they teach it
I’d disagree. Teachers have a choice of where they work, therefore having a choice on the leadership they decide to work for. As far has how they teach, if a teacher does not have a choice in how they teach…why are they teaching? Why not hire robots? We have a choice, as educators. We can choice to move, choose to teach differently, choose to change. Especially in international schools we have the choice.
It might help to clarify which schools and systems we’re talking about. British schools, for example, are threatened with closure if fewer than 30% of their students reach a certain standard in pen-and-paper, content-driven exams. The best way to pass such exams, I’m sure we all agree, is to subject kids to lots of exam practice and repetition of subject matter. Web 2 applications (or whatever) in that context are simply an irrelevance, and that’s the context in which the vast majority of teachers in the UK actually work. Are teachers really ‘not in control of the information’ that those kids need to pass those exams? Should they simply ignore what their bosses have hired them to do and see what happens? ‘Quit and move’ isn’t much of an option given the current state of teacher recruitment in the UK. I suspect it’s the same elsewhere.
I agree that private and international schools are often more flexible than this. However, I can’t help but feel that instead of, or as well as, getting frustrated at teachers, it might be more profitable to start, or continue, canvassing those who actually make the decisions which shape the educational landscape. It’s a truism by now to point out that, if you want to change the teaching, start by changing the assessment by which kids and teachers are judged. I would LOVE to see this happen and I am completely in agreement with you that it should (and eventually will) happen. I simply think that it’s a bit ambitious to expect teachers to lead the changes; they can’t, in a meaningful way.
Incidentally, I teach older, exam classes in (more or less) the Brit system. I recognise that people with younger classes or in other systems may have a very different experience.
Until recently I was part of an organisation working with distance (flexible) adult education in Sweden and thereby trying to change the way many educators work. Simplifing somewhat, five years ago we worked with teachers, four years ago we added school principals and three years ago we added politicians in charge of schools. As some of the comments above show REAL change needs at least the agreement of those above.
However, teachers should not use this as an excuse. We need to help students learn efficiently and if we believe the best way to do this is using the new medias then we should be using the new medias. Of course we have to teach students how to pass the relevant exams and in part this means using traditional methods, but that still leaves room for creativity in teaching … Doesn’t it?
Of course it does or, at least, I’m sure it does in a lot of places. The truth of the matter is, however, that for most teachers, ’success’ is determined by very old-fashioned measures. The measures and outcomes- the exams, the league tables, the certificates, the grades, the whole mechanism of determining ’success’ and ‘failure’ – are what needs to change. Teachers can’t change the ‘measures’, and for all the passionate exchanges in the blogosphere, we aren’t the ones who are going to make the big decisions. Using ‘new’ methods for the 10% of the time left to us after exam drilling is done ensures that those methods will be viewed as novelties as opposed to ‘real’ work and ‘real’ learning. Indeed, using new methods to teach old skills and old content is possibly fun but ultimately pointless; why not just stick with old methods, since they seem to work pretty well?
Things WILL change, that seems obvious; but they won’t change primarily as a result of telling teachers to ‘change’ regardless of whether their school, district or authority ‘change’. As ever, context is all; international schools are very different beasts to state schools and, of course, very different to each other.
New blog post: Putting the I in change http://www.utechtips.com/?p=928Quote