Week 14 - Reflecting on the Course

Week 14 Reflection

I have two big takeaways from this course, which are really ideas I’ve had for some time that were reinforced by the activities and readings we’ve done:

First, there is so much that goes into every lesson that teachers teach. We did the activity where we thought of all of the environmental factors that might go into what a child was thinking as a teacher was teaching, most of which are out of the teacher’s control. But many of those factors the teacher does think about, like the pacing of the lessons, making activities varied and interesting, setting the culture of the classroom,  deciding what to focus on in the first place, deciding how to hold students accountable for what they are supposed to have learned. I appreciated the resources and ideas for varying lessons and writing meaningful goals and objectives. There are so many decisions that teachers have to make, which, of course, having taught in high schools for over a decade, I already knew. But I feel this course really underlined that for me.

The second thing I took away was how big and terrible a beast our system of education is. We did the activity where we imagined ourselves as different stakeholders in education (parents, teachers, politicians, researchers, etc.) and made arguments about why it should be our group that decides what’s in the curriculum. Which was interesting. But my experience has been that two forces really wield power in deciding the curriculum. One is the sum of decisions made by administrators at the district level sometime in the past about what courses to offer/books to use, which filter down to teachers at individual schools, who have the freedom to present the information in ways they see fit, but have to basically align their teaching to the resources that they have. The other is the gigantic grinding power of status quo bias. After doing something once, it becomes easy to do it again, and difficult to change. So while teachers do update their lessons as the years roll on, much more stays the same from year to year than changes. It’s also true higher up the education food chain, where meaningful changes take resources and a good plan to implement. So instead of new course offerings that reflect current needs, we end up with “fad initiatives” that administrators roll in one year and are immediately replaced by something else the next year while teachers more or less go on as they always have. Last week we talked about accountability, and it turns out that it’s a difficult thing to decide how to even measure, let alone to ascribe to any particular stakeholder. So that’s how we get our current system, where students keep passing and teachers keep teaching almost regardless of what happens in the classroom. Some things get better, some get worse, but mostly everyone muddles through.

I guess a third takeaway would be unfounded optimism. Because in spite of the huge crushing load teachers carry everyday and the massive coordinated effort it takes to make changes to the education system, if there’s anyone who can do it, it is the brilliant, dedicated, caring and hardworking people in our class. Also that while the problems seem dismal and beyond repair, there are children who by dint of their determination and hard work will be all right regardless of their situation, like the ones who came in to talk to us that one night, or the ones in my classes who do all of the extra credit and manage to learn in spite of their peers fighting, cursing at each other, merching it on foe’n’em’s graves and watching videos on their phones all around them.

If things do get better, it will be because a lot of hardworking, thoughtful people worked for a really long time at making it better.