Author Archives: Stephen Seyfer

Children In Our Safekeeping

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Nothing in the daily news causes more parent angst than a school shooting or traffic accident involving a school bus. An event may happen a thousand miles away in a community completely different than our own, yet the immediate response is fear that such a tragedy can happen to my or a neighborhood child.

We give our children to the school of our choice with the expectation that our child will be safeguarded and returned to us at the end of school day. School in this sense includes everything a child takes part in that is under school supervision. For some children school begins and ends with a bus ride. For some children, school is not only on the school campus but on field and athletic trips. For some children, school is between the school bells and for others school begins and ends well outside the bell system. No matter, the parental expectation is that a child will be safeguarded always.

The reality is exactly that. Children in school are safeguarded.

  • The odds of a child being exposed to a school shooting are .00051 to 1. Even though the news of school shootings is horrendous and the frequency is increasing, the odds are exceptionally small that a child will be exposed to a school shooting. There are 54,000,000 children enrolled in 130,900 different schools in the US. The number of schools where shootings do not occur is so high that it dwarfs the number where shootings happen.

Truth rather than reality, however, is that even with exceptionally low odds, when a parent’s child is shot or exposed to a school shooting the world is never the same again. And no one predicts a school shooting; they happen without immediate warning.

  • Children are more at risk of being shot at home or in their home community than at school. Gun violence is the leading cause of child death. More than 17,000 children are gunshot each year or about 60 children each day of the year.

The incidence of children killed by guns and mass shootings at schools has not changed gun laws one iota. One can argue that Americans are more committed to protecting the 2nd Amendment than they are to protecting their children.

  • School safety and security measures have drastically improved and increased in the last five years. The days of unrestricted access and unlocked doors are no more. More schools are surrounded by camera systems and require identification before a person, even parents, can enter the school during a school day. However, not every window is bulletproof, and few backpacks or coat pockets are inspected at the schoolhouse door.

The next layer of school safety security will affect after school, evening, and weekend school activities. Few schools screen attendees at high school games.

  • The NHTSA rates school buses as one of the safest modes of transportation for children. A child is eight times more likely to be injured in an accident in a family car than on a school bus. School bus accidents involving a fatality are less than 1% of all fatal accident each year and most of the deaths in school bus accidents are not children.

However, seeing an overturned school bus causes immediate images of injured and bleeding children and worry about school transportation systems.

  • Safety features on school buses have improved in recent years. And driver training and school-to-bus communications also have improved. Additionally, the Hollywood image of a school bus driver who is friendly and caring about each child aboard the bus is more reality than not.

These facts do not mean that children are free from all harmful events while in school. Playground and athletic injuries happen. Our school soccer-playing grand daughter is recovering from ACL surgery following a game time injury. More than 200,000 children each year are treated for playground injuries, most of these from falling or tripping. There are 3,500,000 or more sports-related injuries each year. The likelihood of injury is still small; about 2.9 injuries per 1,000 athletes. These facts are facts, yet they do not dissuade parents from promoting and encouraging their children to be active at recess or joining school teams.

Bullying and harassment of children in and out of school is real. These peer-to-peer problems call for constant school vigilance and support. Approximately 20% of students report some form of bullying or harassment each year; one in five children. The degree of impact varies and is difficult to discern. For too many children, bullying and harassment is a PTSD injury that leads to significant socio-emotional issues.

Mental health for growing children has become a national issue with multiple layers. Because they are school-aged, all mental issues for children have some connection to their school. Schools that traditionally focus on academic, activities, arts, and athletics now add social-emotional health to their school programming. We will see state-funded resources for mental health education and programming increase soon.

The Big Duh!

Children are vulnerable to all sorts of accidents and tragedies. As I write this, a media note flashed on my screen telling of a child in our state struck in a school crosswalk this morning by a motorist. No one saw this event coming, but it happened.

Additionally, we read and hear of “bad” people who have access and do harm to children, in and out of school. Whenever the story is about a school person, we wonder if children in our school ever encounter such harmful adults. Sadly, school shootings and illegal, harmful adult behaviors do happen. Each of these stories re-energizes parent and school scrutiny of their child/student’s life so that such events are increasingly unlikely to happen.

Often, we hear it said after a child tragedy, “We have to make sure this never happens again!” Truth be told, “never again” is not attainable. However, creating an unlikelihood of tragedy and living safely and sanely within our reality of facts are attainable and school is a good place for children to be. Do not be surprised when your local school installs bulletproof windows and walks children and school guests through metal detectors in the near future. Safeguarding means safeguarding.

Be Bold and Emboldened About Your 2025-26 Educational Goals

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Every new school year brings a discussion of the educational goals a school will strive to achieve for its students. This is not the time for a complete rewrite of goals; there is no time to retool for new goals. But August is the right time to confirm existing goals and ensure commitment of all school resources to achieving those goals. In the weeks before children walk into school, be bold in publicly broadcasting your educational goals for your students and embolden all educators to achieve your/their goals.

Achieving educational goals is not a New Year Resolution; be loud, be active, be honest!

Where are your school’s or your classroom’s achievement goals published today? Most often they lie in the humdrum posting of school mission statements, the finer print in newsletters, and are announced on day one but seldom to never mentioned after day one. It is no wonder that so few are achieved. We allow the busy urgency of school days to overwhelm the goals that our school business is supposedly committed to achieve. State and restate your achievement goals every week in order to keep them vibrant.

Educational goals are not like an annual new year resolution. Most of us break those resolutions before the end of January, if not before. First, educational goals are about children, not our proverbial self-promise to lose ten pounds of body weight. Instead of looking at our image in a bathroom mirror, we look at the faces of classrooms of children who are counting on our commitment to advance their education. Each child’s face stands for our promise to cause that child to learn and grow because of our work. Every time we look at a child’s face, we need to tell ourselves “Advance this child’s education today!”

Achievement goals are a public commitment

Educational achievement goals are public commitments to cause children to learn and grow. They are not silent, personal promises to give up late night bowls of ice cream. Publish your educational goals as a school and as individual classrooms. One of the reasons new year resolutions fail is that we keep them to ourselves. We do not tell anyone that we want to lose ten pounds; we make it a silent, personal struggle. Instead, we need to enlist all educators, school parents, and school community in helping our goal achievement by telling them on day one and all school year-long what we will achieve this school year for our students.

There is a positive and active snowballing effect when goals are loudly published. Snowballing occurs when a small effort begins to accumulate more mass and more membership because it is in motion. As goal achievement occurs, individuals want to be part of the snowball; they want to be identified with its positive imaging. We need to celebrate snowballing and proclaim every classroom that is joining in the achievement work.

Achievement is personal

We need to make our educational goals for children personal. Teaching and learning are essentially personal activities between teachers and children. It is extremely personal, yet we always depersonalize the outcomes of teaching and learning. We aggregate the data of goals achievement, and we drop names and drop accountability, usually because we do not achieve the goals we published. Instead, we need to keep the data disaggregated and personal. If a teacher knows that her students’ learning achievements will be averaged with all other students’ data, there is diminished urgency every day to “push” on those goals. We see data obfuscation clearly with high achieving schools whose high averaging practices hide the reality of low achieving classrooms. Or with low achieving schools whose averaging practices hide the reality of high achieving classrooms. We need to disaggregate data to make goal achievement real at the classroom level where achievement is measured. There always is a worry that disaggregation allows data to identify students. The equal worry is that fully aggregated data makes those students disappear. Let’ see – using data to effectively educate all children or using data to hide children who are never fully educated. As our practices are FERPA-compliant, we shall decide to educate all children.

Be bold with honesty

Honesty about goals and goal achievement is a necessity. Too much of our culture today is hammered by “big lying” about data and practices. Without commenting on our “big liars”, consider the big lie effects. Lying makes facts untrustworthy and fact checking is ridiculed. Honesty is what honesty does; it builds trust. We need to talk about our positive achievements, and we need to talk about when we fail to achieve the goals we set. And, after explaining our failure to achieve, we need to recommit ourselves to achieving success by honestly discontinuing failed efforts and beginning new efforts. No one likes to hear that a school or classroom failed to achieve its goals, but they dislike even more the lies that are told to hide the honest facts. Educators, parents, and community will respect honest effort with honest reporting that is followed by honest changes in effort.

This August, publish your student achievement goals. Publish the work efforts that will achieve your goals. Publish and talk about the team commitment of educators, parents, and community to accomplish your 2025-26 student achievement goals. Publish the date of your first reporting of progress on your goal achievements. And publish your commitment to every child in school that they will be goal achievers.

Be bold and be emboldening regarding your student achievement goals for the 2025-26 school year.

Johnny Was In 9th Grade Once; Then He Grew Up

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“I am so glad to see you,” a smiling, tall, thin-haired man said to me holding out his hand in greeting. Beside him stood an attractive woman with a similar, warm smile. “You were our 8th grade American History teacher,” she said. “We saw your name on the guest list and had to talk with you.” The grade and the subject narrowed my memory to several hundred names. However, when she said their names and that they were married, I whispered “1971, fifth period. You sat in the second desk in the row nearest the door and you sat halfway back in the middle row.” They smiled and nodded. “How is your twin brother?” I asked him. “Your smile still lights up the room,” I told her. “Married,” I commented, “Everyone at school knew you would be one day, even when you were in 8th grade.” And we moved to a corner of the room and talked about their lives since junior high school.

There is a moment in the movie Dead Poets Society when actor Robin Williams walks his class down the hall to look at pictures of past students. Behind the showcase windows are class pictures of students from 10, 20 and 30 years ago. Some are pictures individual actors and athletes posed and in action. Some are photos of students in science labs and art and music studios. “Who are these people? What dreams of life did they hope for? What became of them?”

These two former students instantly morphed from photos from the 70s to flesh and blood people today. She is a retired elementary teacher in a neighboring school district. He is a retired, decorated police officer. How wonderful! And how exceptional is this occurrence.

They grow up but our memories do not.

Teachers and their students share moments in time. For the span of a school year, sometimes two or three years, they share the space together, a classroom or a gym or a stage or a playing field. Teachers teach and students learn. Lessons are planed and acted out in class with these students in mind. Each student’s “school personality” is exposed to the teacher incrementally over 180 school days: likewise, the teacher’s school persona is exposed to students. School personalities are curated for school purposes and seldom show the person’s real characteristics. So, we take them for what they are.

Some students and some teachers are so guarded about their personalities that they present one dimensional, flat image of themselves. They could be cardboard sitting in desks and propped behind a desk. Their school life and non-school life never intersect. Others are highly animated, and, like a glaring headlight, it is difficult to get out of their beam. We know what they did Saturday night though we would just as soon not know. For most, however, their school personality is exactly who they are at this stage of their adolescent and adult life.

I have a scrapbook of class photos and a collection of yearbooks spanning five decades. I can name many of the faces with immediate recall of incidents from the school year(s) we shared. Some faces require a glance at the cut line below the photo to attach a name. With that clue, a memory may return. For too many faces, not even reading the name retrieves a clue about that person. The “Dead Poets” students and I share this perspective – we see faces captured in time, faces of one-time students who graduated and lived lives beyond their brief time in school. And we do not know anything about those lives.

At class reunions, I play a game with fellow Class of 66 mates. “Can you name every one of your K-12 teachers?” I can all my teachers and most classmates name about 80% of theirs. This is not unusual, I think. Teachers are memorable. A different question is, “How many teachers did you stay in touch with after graduation?” For most classmates, the answer is “zero.” With a smile, I explain, “I taught with several of our teachers and several others were on the faculty in schools where I was their principal.” Unusual, and my stories about these career intersections stay very professional.

Teachers and students grow their degrees of separation

There are many reasons that explain the transitory nature of teacher and student acquaintanceship. For one, it is how the “conveyor belt” structure of school runs. Students move annually through a schoolhouse spending one year in each grade level and one school year in a teacher’s assignment of children to teach. There is no stopping the conveyor belt. A second reason is the professional distance kept between teachers and children. Knowing a child as a student is to know their educational likes and dislikes just enough to be able to engage the child in learning. Professionally, a teacher wants to know the intellectual, socio-emotional, and psycho-motor characteristics of a child that will help the child/student to be a successful student without knowing any of the personal intimacies of the child. It is a proper balancing and distancing that works both ways.

Mobility also causes separation. Just as students move through K-12 education from school to school, teachers change teaching assignments, schools, and school districts. Since teaching my former 8th grade students, I changed from teacher to principal to superintendent to school board member and served in three other school districts in three different states.

Staying in touch

A best friend and fellow teacher from the 70s is the opposite of me. He lives in the city where he taught, moved from the feeder junior high school to the high school where students matriculated and knew many children/students for six years of their school lives. And they knew him. He was a teacher/coach who relished his relationships with classroom students and football players and can, at the drop of a hat, retell their exploits 50 years later. My friend, now in his 80s and a few of his former student/players, now in their 70s, see, phone, and text each other just to “stay in touch.” They relive stories as well as update each other.

Several of his former students are now teachers in their own classrooms. My friend is their career-long mentor. Although his real-time classroom experience ended with retirement in the early 2000s, they value his insights and instincts about good teaching.

The Big Duh!

The iconic “Johnny” of school stories grows up. Years ago, Johnny was a student in our classroom and a team or club or cast member under our tutelage. For a brief period, we were engaged, teacher and student, in teaching and learning. We shared our “school personalities” to optimize student learning and in those learning activities created memories, many that last over time. However, Johnny does grow up and life after our classroom is what Johnny’s life is about; not the memories of our class-time together.

At the same time, Johnny’s teacher also evolves within professional experiences. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Johnny faces become part of a teacher’s memory bank of students. Often there “a” Johnny that really sticks out in a teacher’s memory, but even that face is a photo in time and does not resemble the adult Johnny who grew up. I was in a checkout line at a local grocery market two years ago. The tall man pushing a cart in front me turned, took a hard look at my face, and said, “I know you. You were…” In that instance, I was vulnerable to our shared past. I wondered, “Who is this and what did I do that was memorable for him?” You never know when former teachers and students will cross paths.

Betterment Is A Teacher’s Constant PD

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Maya Angelou taught us to “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Her words are more than appropriate for schoolteachers whose calling to teach requires constant professional development. A teaching license is just the beginning of many emerging threads of career-long self-improvement. A teaching career is a pathway for constant learning of how to do better.

Betterment

I like the concept of betterment. Betterment is defined as the act or process of making something “better.” Better, as the comparative of good, means that the act or process creates something that is improved to be more than good. Betterment of teaching, then, is a constant ratcheting upward of a teacher’s proficiency in the capacities that characterize better teaching.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/betterment

We begin at “good enough.” Our educator preparation programs, as outlined in state statutes, license teachers who have obtained the status of good enough to be licensed. Teacher candidates must demonstrate the minimal requirements to earn institutional endorsement for a teacher license. In Wisconsin, these requirements are prescribed in PI 34 legislation. The same license is issued to candidates who superbly meet the endorsement criteria and to those who meet the minimal criteria. Good enough earns a license.

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/code/admin_code/pi/34

An employing school board can assume that a newly licensed teacher’s preparation is “good enough” to teach the school district’s children and curriculum. Further, in today’s shortage of people seeking employment as classroom teachers, a licensed teacher often is good enough to match children in a classroom with a teacher. Good enough is far better than no teacher.

Shifting responsibility for professional development

The impetus for professional development changed in 2019 for teachers in Wisconsin. Prior to 2019 teachers had to complete six credits of PD every five years to renew their teaching licenses. Beginning in 2019 teachers with six semesters of teaching under their Tier 1 licenses are eligible for a lifetime license. A lifetime license means a teacher does not need to do anything other than be employed in a teaching position requiring the issued license to be fully licensed for the rest of the teacher’s career. Professional development shifted from license renewal to the employing school board’s requirement for contract renewal.

Money makes professional development happen. Parallel to school board responsibility for teacher professional development has been the loss of federal and state funding for public education. Legislators used the distribution of federal funding during and after the COVID pandemic as a reason to diminish state funding. When federal money expired, legislators did not increase state funding but left school allocations at their diminished levels. The result is that most school boards must fund professional development for teachers from local tax revenues or not invest in teacher professional development. It is a fact that when school board revenues are scarce, professional development gives way to the many other needs of the school district.

Yet the need for PD for teachers has never been greater. The challenges of pandemic learning loss, the post-pandemic socio-emotional needs of children, and the increasing challenges of artificial intelligence in daily and school life require teachers to upgrade their professional abilities. The responsibility that shifted from state licensing requirements to school board contract requirements now shifts to teachers’ personal requirements for professional integrity. In the absence of district-led professional development, betterment is up to each teacher.

Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid of standing still – Chinese Proverb

Getting started on a self-help regimen is easier when a person adopts a proven strategy. A strategy is like holding a checklist in one hand and a mirror in the other as asking “What is my capacity to enact each of the ideas on this check list?”  I offer SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) as a proven strategy. It works like this. Set aside some quiet time for personal, professional reflection. Hold up each concept in your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats list and ask, “What is my status here?” Be kind but be critical and make an honest appraisal.

Consider typical teacher strengths and assess your positive skills, understandings, and disposition for these. What can you do to sustain or even strengthen these?

  • Classroom management skills
  • Subject matter expertise
  • Building a rapport with all children.
  • Differentiating instruction
  • Creative lesson planning
  • Patience and empathy
  • Communicating with parents
  • Celebrating success

Consider areas where many teachers display weaker skills, understandings, and dispositions. What can you do to strengthen these?

  • Time management
  • Active listening skills – not just hearing
  • Using a variety of teaching methods – problem-based, inquiry-based, project-based
  • Incorporating new technologies
  • Getting overwhelmed with paperwork
  • Working with disagreeable peers
  • Accepting criticism
  • Managing paraprofessionals and aides
  • Adaptability – engaging every child every day
  • Resilience – teaching is hard work; keeping a positive attitude
  • Addressing bias
  • Maintaining a growth mindset
  • Cross disciplinary teaching

Consider the opportunities of professional growth, usual and novel.

  • District in-service
  • Professional organizations
  • Higher education
  • Conventions
  • Reading groups
  • Personal investigation

Consider typical threats to teacher stability.

  • Changes to school policies
  • Budget cuts
  • Increased workload
  • Ambiguity
  • New administrators
  • Lack of parental involvement/support

Set targets – what are you prepared to do?

My first pass at SWOT seemed disastrous as I created a lengthy list in each SWOT category. I was overly proud of my strengths, overly critical of my weaknesses, uninformed about my opportunities, and naïve about my threats. I set the lists aside for two weeks. My return to SWOT was more introspective and measured. What was my real status and how did I know this? And which S, W, O, and T did I prioritize as requiring my direct attention.

The result was a concise list of professional development professional understandings, skills, and dispositions that clearly needed strengthening, clarifying, and/or eliminating. Having the personality of an outcome-based teacher, I stated each goal as the outcome I wanted to achieve and strategized how to achieve that outcome. My Occam’s Razor question in creating my personal, professional development program is “What am I prepared to do?” Reality was that although I held something as a personal goal, I really was not prepared at that time to engage in that goal. Finally, I had two strengths to strengthen, two weaknesses to improve, one opportunity to pursue, and one threat to address.

The Big Duh! Betterment is continuous.

Do not SWOT yourself every day. Give target achievement plan time to unfold. Then, do not be afraid to SWOT yourself again. My outcome-based guru, Bill Spady, taught me that “success begets future success.” Betterment is a long-term process achieved with commitment over time.

Teaching Is Methodical

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Causing children to learn is hard and complicated work. We use the word “teaching” to generalize how a teacher does the work of causing learning. Teaching, though, infers the one doing the teaching understands and uses a method of instruction that is chosen and honed to cause children to learn specific educational outcomes. If there is no teaching method applied, then a child could learn anything from anyone with the same likelihood of learning success. Or a child could be fully self-taught, who needs a teacher. Teaching methods matter and teachers need to understand their methods.

I teach in the manner I was taught.

Teacher preparation curriculum includes courses in teaching methods. Check the curriculum of any college, university, or other approved teacher prep program and one or more courses in “methods” are needed for program completion. Candidates for a teaching license must do student or supervised teaching to confirm their ability to teach students in the subject or grade levels of their license. However, once a licensed teacher is employed as a teacher, most find that their baseline of teaching reflects how they were taught when they were a student in K-12 schools. Predominantly, this method is labeled traditional teaching.

Traditional teaching is teacher-centered, emphasizes rote memorization and recall of information. It is structured within class time, uses textbook and publisher materials, and assigns children to work independently. Children read/watch/listen, do practice assignments based on the information presented, and take a quiz. The teacher is the source of information and skills children learn.

Teachers learn multiple methods in their prep programs.

An AI-study (Gemini and Chat GPT) says that teacher preparation programs today stress student-centered teaching methods with the key characteristic being learner-centered teaching. These methods include include strategies that

  • are tailored to student needs, abilities, and interests,
  • encourage active participation,
  • use the teacher as a facilitator of learning not the source of information,
  • are culturally responsive and inclusive of student background, and
  • use differentiated strategies that meet the needs of all children in the class.

As students, teacher candidates learn the theory and best practices for engaging children in their own learning. They can try these theories and practices in their student or supervised teaching. Teachers are academically trained to be student-centered.

Realities of the classroom are not academic.

Even after working in classrooms as a student-teacher, the realities of being THE TEACHER are overwhelming. I do not diminish the student-teaching experience, because it is essential for building confidence in oneself and learned teaching practices in a safe and controlled environment. Without student teaching or other forms of pre-licensing practice teaching, too many children would experience shaky instruction from untried first-year teachers. In student teaching there always is the presence of a hovering veteran teacher who will correct, fill-in, and polish instruction that a student-teacher left unsatisfied. Not for an employed teacher.

The first days and weeks in a classroom of your own is momentous for most first-year teachers. While a handful of rookie teachers claim to be wonderfully fulfilled by the challenges they face, many rookies spend sleepless nights and tear-filled morning drives to school worried about their ability to teach. The reality is that dozens of children sit and wait to be taught while a rookie teacher finds their way. A first-year teacher is alone in a classroom with a tremendous responsibility that feels like a burden.

Reality brings the rookie teacher to traditional teaching methods for several reasons. Creating learner-centered instruction is complicated. At the get-go, it requires time, trust, and confidence in a method. A teacher does not just announce “Today, children, we are going to use an inquiry method to discover why ancient and modern people migrate around the world.” It takes time to “set the table” for discovery-type methods of teaching. A series of lesson plans that model how children will “inquire” are necessary. The teacher needs to assure that all children are confident in the background knowledge necessary for inquiry into unfamiliar information. Children need to be prepared for collaborative learning. Student-centered methods become richer over time but every first experience with student-based learning requires thorough preparation, or it will flop. On the other hand, traditional teaching is very concise, straightforward, and teacher controlled.

When a teacher chooses an inquiry or discovery method, the teacher explains or demonstrates what the children will do to discover the unfamiliar information they are about to learn BUT the teacher does not provide conclusions about their new learning. The teacher helps children in drawing and confirming their own conclusions about their new learning. Facilitation skills are honed over time and can be a little messy as students drive the timeline. On the other hand, traditional teaching is concise and straightforward.

If the teacher chooses to use problem-based teaching, children must be pre-taught how to suspend elements of reality to make a teacher-contrived problem worthy of their time and effort. Once children learn what it means to suspend reality, PBL opens them to a multitude of learning situations – but it takes training and time.

If the teacher chooses project-based or outcome-based teaching, teacher and children must set up rubrics they will use to assure their student-centered learning meets grade level or course curricular standards.

Using non-traditional teaching methods puts a lot of planning, preparation, and facilitation pressure on a first-year teacher. To compound that pressure, children in student-centered methods are given responsibility for their individual and group learning. In the gradual release of responsibility from teacher to student there are inherent fears that children will not learn as much as they would have with teacher-controlled learning.

Lastly, traditional teaching aligns with rule-based classroom management systems. It is part of the “control feature.” Children abide by the rules or are disciplined. When principals make spot visits to classrooms, seeing all children seated and “working” fits traditional views of good teaching. Seeing children milling about, talking to each other, doing different things in the same classroom requires the principal to dig deeper into the teacher’s lesson planning and teaching methods.

The Big Duh!

Teaching methods matter. As methods, they are methodical in how specific strategies in each method cause different learner outcomes. These are outcomes beyond tested knowledge. We should expect and encourage rookie teachers to appropriately use methods of direct and explicit teacher-led teaching AND a variety of student-centered methods in their first year(s) of teaching. If they are not expected and encouraged to do so, it is too easy for a young teacher to become a traditional, single-method teacher.

It is possible to imagine a grade level K-5 and a subject course teacher in grades 6-12 being only a traditional method teacher. It is more difficult to imagine children sitting through their K-12 years experiencing only traditional teaching. It is even more difficult to imagine how a traditionally taught curriculum prepares children for this 21st century.

Principals and curriculum directors, please hire and nurture teachers who are prepared to use a variety of teaching methods. Coach them along their way. Your students and our future will thank you.