Listening to Michelle speak about her ideal spurred me to look for others’ visions of ideal educational models, and I came across this …show more content…
vision, written by U.S. Secretary of Education John King and quoted in a September, 2016 issue of The Atlantic:
The ideal school wouldn’t need to be fancy but it would be clean and painted, the floors polished, the windows sparkling. The adults would treat it like a temple to learning, communicating to students, teachers, parents, and community members that what goes on there is important and worthy of their best efforts. The school’s leader would teach part-time and spend a lot of time in classrooms observing, to give his colleagues clear, actionable feedback on how to improve their practice. Teachers would write the school’s curriculum, with the goal of preparing all students for success after high school, in college or careers. They would assign their students work worth doing—from reading meaningful literature to stressing problem solving in mathematics to using original documents in social studies and teaching science through experiments. The curriculum would include music, art, dance, and physical education.
(Full article available here.)
Sounds familiar, no?
Reading this, it is not difficult for me to remember that only a handful of years ago I was struggling to find my own vision of an ideal learning community.
I had grown weary of the constraints typical of a traditional educational model: testing, excessive quantitative assessment of teacher productivity and student learning, and the Orwellian language of the system (students as “FTEs”, our learning goals as “course objectives”, and student growth as “measurable outcomes”). And I could no longer bear the tensions that my unreasonable workload created in my relationship with my family, nor the resentment that grades created in my relationships with my students. In my ideal classroom, I thought, everyone present would understand that learning is inherently valuable; that study happens not because there is a test to pass at some point in the future, but because our minds are curious; and that discussion and participation is essential not because there are “points” attached to it, but because it is through thoughtful engagement with other minds that our own minds stretch and develop. This is what I believed as a devotee of the liberal arts, as a thinker and writer and reader, as a life-long student and teacher. Why weren’t the educational institutions in which I had taught on board with that philosophy? Wasn’t my deep faith in those truths the reason I had begun teaching in the first place? And if I was alone in that faith, could I honestly keep teaching in a system that practiced education so wildly
differently?
I left teaching. I took a year off entirely. I wasn’t sure I’d ever return to a classroom.
And then, only by chance, I stumbled into the Attic, and it felt like grace.
I don’t mean to paint the Attic in too rosy a glow. We are a community of humans, and therefore we have our difficult days, our strains, our conflicts of vision and interest. What overrides these challenges, however, is our common claim on the ideals that exist as the bedrock of our work together:
Learning is inherently valuable.
The practice of learning is more like dancing than like walking a straight line. It can be messy. It can be beautiful, but unpredictable. It refuses to be tamed, or reined, or corralled by easy and universal measurable standards.
Learning thrives when given light, art, space, open air, green vistas.
Learning thrives when it happens in community.
We are all teachers and learners. We all have strengths and gifts and wisdom to share with one another. We should trust this (perhaps above all else).
The actions we make in pursuing our goals as learners should be meaningful, personal, and real.
During Michelle’s visit, she asked each of us gathered in the room to share a bit about ourselves and our career interests and dreams. Where would we like to end up, and what work would we like to be doing? The teens volunteered their ambitions for their lives—they called into being visions of themselves as future historians, medical professionals, scientists, writers, business owners, artists. When my turn to speak rolled around, I didn’t have to think. “This is it, guys,” I said. “This is what I want to do when I grow up.” The kids laughed, of course (goofy, sentimental adults!), but I had said it genuinely and with gratitude, aware of my incredible luck at having landed in this place where my ideals are shared and championed and made manifest every single day.