As all of our educators head back to school for a new year, I am a little envious of the teachers who will be standing in front of a new group of learners over the next couple of weeks. I miss teaching students every day and I especially miss the excitement that comes with a brand new year. Students will walk into new classrooms, with a new teacher, a new set of classmates, ready to unpack new school supplies. What will not be new to many of them is the anxiety that resides just below the surface and is fed by questions like: Will my teacher understand me? Will I have any friends? Will I get the help/challenge that I need? Will there be adults who care about me and accept me for who I am? Something else that will not be new is the knowledge that things WILL be different this year than last. The curriculum content will change, the teacher's expectations will be different, and classroom procedures will vary from past years. Amazingly, young learners do not typically struggle with this part. They are amazingly resilient and adaptable to change. Especially if they are well supported and cared for.
I am completely immersed in my passion and efforts to support change in our schools that will benefit our learners. I will not re-hash what I have already shared in my blogs about the documented need and urgency for change, but suffice it to say, our children need us, as educators, to shift our practices. I have been disheartened in the last few weeks to witness multiple occasions where high quality and well informed efforts to support and inform change have been thwarted or adjusted because they do not align with the "American market". I find this to be frustrating, embarrassing, and discouraging. I have great faith in our educators and I am certain that our schools are brimming with talented, motivated teachers who are very capable of making the same changes that are being made in other parts of the world. Rather than making changes to high quality change efforts to fit the "American market", I will continue to challenge our educators to create a new culture where we are as resilient and adaptable to change as the students who enter our classrooms. Like the students, though, it must be done with support and care from the system.
I challenge our schools and districts to embrace ONE substantial change this year that is focused on learning rather than just a cursory response to student achievement data. Maybe it is a focus on process over content, it could be a shift to competency based practices, it could be a commitment to challenge students to lead their own learning, or perhaps it is the integration of academic subject areas. Work collaboratively and set aside your other initiatives long enough to really figure out what supports, steps, resources, etc... are needed to truly make this ONE change. I am not talking surface level, check-the-box-and-move-on kind of change. I mean real change that looks and feels different, infiltrates the entire system and has a measurable impact on student learning that is not only visible, but also long-lasting.
We must move beyond doing what we have always done and we must stop limiting our vision for change by the current structures and paradigms that we hold so dear. We are preparing students for a future that we cannot even fathom. It is difficult to justify educating them in a setting that has changed little in the last 100 years.
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