Tag Archives: causing learning

It Is Time to Emulate Others

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Adapt or die. A simple and elegant either/or statement of a problematic state of being. The act of adapting may be voluntary or involuntary, but the need for change is dire. If not, death or literal fading toward obscurity and non-existence will ensue. Such is life.

We use this phrase in many contexts to give urgency to a necessary change. There is no human death, but the symbolism works. Here is one that strikes at the heart of education. American public education is the proverbial mile-wide river that carries a lot of water but has no depth. Our educational system is tasked by legislation and local mandates to achieve a wide expanse of outcomes, but because there are so many tasks our achievements are exceptionally shallow. And without significant depth of achievement, public education is dying of 1,000 cuts of complaint. There is no deep cut channel in American public education to give it an enduring and inarguable purpose.

We need to define the purpose and mission of public education so that our clearly written educational goals for all children are meaningfully understood and assessed and our achievements can stand on the merits of their accomplishment.

Reconsider the problem.

We have tunnel vision in assessing and valuing American public education. We have so many things to do, but we are accountable for only two outcomes – annual reading and math achievement. The Wisconsin statewide school report card system also lists graduation, attendance, and discipline rates and disparities of achievement based on gender and exceptionalities. However, in Wisconsin, as well as every other state, only reading and math achievement matter. And the data for reading and math are not good.

Sadly, the data align with the systems that create them. Our data accurately tell us that reading and math abilities in our students have declined and continue to decline. These are documented facts, because we prioritize and use single data points to assess and label the quality of American education. Thus, we pre-ordain our tunnel vision, fixate on narrowed data points, and bemoan education based on our fixations. Ugh!

It is totally exasperating to public school educators who watch children learn and grow in the arts, music, languages, and technical education curricula. We see children engaged and learning in science, literature, and the social studies. Gyms and auditoriums are packed with students, parents, and community members supporting student performances in athletics and the arts. There are a great many successes in our schools, yet it is the doldrums of reading and math data that form our conclusions about public schools in America.

Our chain link of education systems/assessments/data/conclusions about education are not working so break the chain link.

Adapt new models for American public education.

There are other models of education we should be considering. Today they are competitors and we cannot match the education/assessments/data/outcomes of their schooling. Instead of holding to our non-competitive model, we must learn from them.

Who are they? Singapore and Finland. Although our educational media have described, praised, and then criticized education in Singapore and Finland, we have done little to learn from them. It is time we do. I will generalize about their salient differences from our system. My analysis continues to use math as a curricular example.

  • Educational design.

Singapore is a meritocracy with an emphasis on performance. All students are educated equitably until national assessments begin to sort those with high achievement potential. High potential students continue with a rigorous, academic training and average to low potential students begin career training. A small nation without abundant natural resources, Singapore’s educational system creates human talents that have become their national resource. Education in Singapore is highly centralized, driven from the top down. Their purpose is to find talents in students and optimize talent development for all.

Finland emphasizes social equity, trust, and no stress. All students receive the same, equitable education everywhere. Educational goals are nationalized but delivered locally; teachers not government are responsible for ensuring educational quality. All children are taught to achieve the same high level curricular standards. There are no national/state assessments until the high school (16-year-olds). The Finns place a unique trust in teachers to assess and deliver quality education; they localize education controls. Their purpose is to create generations of well-educated, socially conscious citizens.

American public education is decentralized and regulated by state legislation – we have 50 individual state systems of public education. We define education at the state level and give local control to school boards that create their own priorities based upon local needs and values. Each school has its own mission statement, purpose, and lists of educational goals, but few hold these as their non-negotiable “North Star.” Public education has evolved into educational options with ill-defined standards of excellence. Federal and state governments provide legitimacy and funding to non-public schools as educational alternatives under Parent Choice initiatives. Our purpose is to create literate young adults ready for college and careers and citizenship.

  • Teachers

In Singapore, teachers are recruited from the top 5% of their high achieving students. Teaching performances are rewarded with bonuses, a continuation of their merits system. Curriculum is dictated by the Ministry of Education (MOE). Teachers participate in a career advancement track administered by their government. Teaching is a valued profession.

In Finland, teachers are required to hold master’s degrees in education. Teaching is a prestigious profession, equal to law and medicine. They are experts in assessing student learning and instructional design and have individual autonomy over their teaching.

American teachers meet their respective state licensing requirements. The federal government no longer classifies teaching as a profession and due to diminished public esteem, low annual income, and increasing job responsibilities there is a national shortage of people who want to be classroom teachers. A significant and growing number of classrooms are taught by people who are not trained as teachers.

  • Assessment systems.

Singapore uses a summative assessment that clearly measures and make decisions on what each student has learned. The MOE supervises all assessments.

Finland’s teachers use formative assessments to guide instruction. Teachers develop their own assessments and use data to individualize student learning and growth.

America’s annual high stakes state assessments are evaluative. We rank students and schools based upon their performance on state assessments. Government threatens underperforming schools to improve or lose federal and state funding. We use assessment data to discard and adopt curricular programs.

  • Mathematics

In Singapore mathematics instruction emphasizes mathematical reasoning, modeling, and real-world problem solving. More importantly, the curriculum builds deep conceptual understanding not memorization. Singapore students chronically top the international test takers.

In Finland teachers assess students on learning processes, problem-solving abilities, collaboration, and application of mathematics. Finland’s students chronically top international test takers. Students often work on a single problem for a full week. Add to this, Finland has ranked as the world’s happiest country for eight years in a row (2025).

American mathematics instruction emphasizes problem solving and finding right answers. Students often are assigned a dozen or more problems to solve every night as homework. Students compete with each other and seldom collaborate to solve problems. We focus on the right answers to math problems do not teach mathematical thinking or logic, although high achieving students may intuit these.

What to do?

Singapore and Finland excel in educating their children because they have clear compasses to keep their education system on track. Singapore’s centralized, rigorous, merits-based system is fundamentally different from Finland’s localized, teacher-driven, low stress, socializing system, yet each is a world-class leader in educational excellence because they do not deviate from their well-defined educational goals.

In comparison, we know that American public education will not be centralized and driven by a federal department. Our Constitution says public education is a state’s issue and each state’s politics will form its educational commitments. Because there is no national direction, we do not have a meaningful national purpose. Additionally, there is no consensus among states as to purpose or urgency. Each state treats public education as a status quo issue – it gets attention only when there are problems and or political advantage to addressing a particular issue.

However, we can

  1. From Finland, ensure educational equity for all children regardless of school district, or neighborhood. All children can be taught to achieve our standards of proficiency. Family socio-economic status should not predetermine learning success.
  2. From Finland and Singapore, teach thinking and best solution problem-solving. Our history of rewarding the efficiency of correct answers not their logic and rationale leave more than 50% of all students undereducated. We need to teach for deep understanding not rote recitation.
  3. From Finland, teach collaboration instead of independent competition, an industrial era model that fails us today. Our traditions of competition make socio-economic backgrounds of children even more pronounced. Collaboration is a learned skill set and we need to teach it.
  4. From Finland and Singapore, require classroom teachers to be highly trained experts in pedagogy and assessment instead of being minimally prepared in subject areas. Requiring a deeper professional preparation and continuing education reclaims a professional status for every teacher.
  5. From Finland, teach less curriculum but teach it so that all children master what they are taught. Every course and grade level currently is overloaded with stuff to be taught and learned. Teaching less will allow children to master the learning of more.
  6. From Finland and Singapore, define our descriptors of educational excellence and hold them as our North Stars. End the use of reading and math as our only data points. Use descriptors of high performance in every school program as expectations for educational achievements. Art, music, social studies, science, world language, technical education, et al equally define the quality of our educational systems. If American education continues to provide broad educational programs of academic, activities, arts, and athletics, then teach to, recognize, and celebrate excellence in each of these.

The Big Duh!

There was a time when America’s public education system was a model the world emulated. However, that time has passed. America’s future will not be improved by recreating our past but in our capacity to create a new future. There are systems that are excelling in educating their youth to be productive adults and contribute to the future of their communities and nation. These nations have become beacons for our emulation. We must adapt or die.

The Art of Teaching Requires Teachers

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The other day I asked three AI vendors, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, to produce a drill and practice routine including assessments to teach punctuation rules to 5th thru 8th grade students. The product needed to be progressive by assessing students’ initial knowledge and use of punctuation, prescribing drill and practice based on assessment data, assessing change in student knowledge and application, and prescribing subsequent drill and practice until each student achieved 90% or better on an assessment. I asked each AI to apply Vygotsky’s zone of proximal learning theory to this request.

Voila! I have three valid and workable drill and practice routines. These routines are pedagogically sound and will cause measurable student learning. However, something is missing.

I then asked each AI to prepare a rationale explaining to children why punctuation rules are important for them to know and use in their written communications.

Voila, again! But each AI product read like dry toast without any butter or preserves.

What do we know?

If “a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down,” providing students with meaning and context makes a lesson learnable. We have many homilies for this. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” seems most apt. AI can present a student with a sound strategy for learning, but it comes up short in providing the necessary meaningful context for learning that a teacher can provide. AI is masterful in the science of teaching but fails in the art of teaching.

Instructional theory tells us that motivation to learn is essential for learning to succeed. Additionally, when a child understands purpose, functionality, and the future value of what they learn, they are motivated to engage with instruction. Thank you, Madeline Hunter.

As I read and reread the AI explanation in my student-like mind, I find no spark, no sense of urgency in engaging in what AI can teach me. The explanations are clearly written; personal and insightful connections are the issue. As I read these routines, I imagine AI is a robot standing in front of the classroom teaching me the rules and applications of punctuation. I imagine a school-casual-dressed humanoid speaking with good midwestern diction. I imagine taking notes and sketching an organizer of the quiz-drill and practice-quiz scenario and still I am not motivated to engage beyond knowing this is a required school assignment.

What to do.

I am missing human connection; a teacher who knows me and my learning needs, strengths and deficits and can make me see “me” in the assignment. Teachers do this all the time. This is what I imagine my teacher saying.

“Remember when I asked each of you to write a short story, just four or five paragraphs, about your favorite summer vacation. Each of you wrote of your wonderful summer memories. Well, I am going to give these writings back to you, only I will give your story to another classmate.

When you read your classmate’s vacation story notice that I have removed all the punctuation. There are no capital letters, no periods, no commas, no question marks, and no apostrophes. The sentences all run together because there is no punctuation. Oh, you say to me, “I cannot read this. It is all one long sentence.” You are correct.

Punctuation helps us to make sense of what we write. Your job is to punctuate the story I give you. Oh, I hear you. We have not studied all the punctuation rules. Well, after I see how well you do your job of punctuating, I will give the class some drill and practice exercises to teach and reinforce your knowledge and use of punctuation in your writing. After a bit of the drill and practice routine, I will give you a quiz to check on your learning and improvements. In two weeks, each of you will know, understand, and be able to use these five punctuations to communicate effectively in your writing. In another month we will study other punctuations.

I am anxious to see how well you do on this assignment.”

As she walked around handing out stories to punctuate, she quietly said to, “You wrote a wonderful story. Punctuation will help everyone to read it.” I noted she spoke personally and quietly to every classmate.

We are engaged.

The Big Duh!

We have known forever that effective instruction involves both the science and the art of teaching. Professional educators are trained in pedagogy and use theory-based strategies to cause children to learn. Effective educators also are masters in the art of teaching.  They intuitively connect students to new learning with purpose and context, and personalization that places a student actively inside the lesson not as a passive completer of the lesson. The art of teaching is the heart of causing learning.

When Self-evident Truths Fail, Teacher Role Modeling Matters

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Sometimes my grandchildren think I was raised in an alien world. And they are right. The era they experience now and the era I experienced as a child are so dissimilar we often seem worlds apart. We are bonded by our love for each other. We share a common last name. We share a common language. We live in the same area of the USA. After that, differences erupt. When we talk about what we believe and value and what we hope for, our worlds begin to disassemble. While I speak of an American life predicated on the balance of freedom and responsibility and our rights of citizenship, and the American Dream, they give real, everyday examples of class-based discrimination, non-accountable behaviors by powerful people, and death of the American Dream. The self-evident truths of an earlier time in our nation no longer hold for children in the early 21st century.

I expand this disassembled reality to the relationship between teachers and students and the generational gap(s) between them. Without a shared trust in self-evident truths, why do we think children should believe what we teach them? Because our actions must be louder than failed words. Teachers have the opportunity and the capacity to show through role modeling that self-evident truths still exist.

What about self-evident truths?

Self-evident truths are propositions that are obviously, intrinsically, and factually true, requiring no other proof or evidence to be accepted and believed as a basis for living. Self-evident truths are mathematical, scientific, and philosophic.

  • Two plus two equals four.
  • Two straight lines cannot enclose a space.
  • The sun rises in the east.
  • Newton’s laws of motion.
  • I think, therefore I am. (I do like Descartes)

And the list goes on.

When they are philosophical, their words have meaning that must be applied to all people in all times. The most famous statement of self-evident truths is in our Declaration of Independence. It says, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Even in the beginning of our nation, this statement held power as an ambitious goal because it was not completely true when it was written. Many of the signers of the Declaration were enslavers. None of the Declaration’s signers believed females were equal to males. And they did not extend equal rights to American Indian peoples. However, slavery was abolished, a Constitutional amendment gave women the right to vote, and in 1924 American Indian people were “granted” citizenship. For the first 150 years of our nation, self-evident truths were not true; they were a goal yet to be obtained by almost 3/4 of the population. In our most recent 100 years, the goal was actualized, and we could faithfully proclaim the philosophic truth of our “self-evident truths.

More importantly, perhaps, self-evident rights were interpreted as every citizen’s right to the American Dream, another ambitious goal for all people in our country and the world. With rights came opportunity and with opportunities fulfilled came “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The right to an American Dream meant that with their hard work all Americans could have employment, a home, and a standard of living that improved with each generation. The American Dream was synonymous with our self-evident truths.

What do my grandchildren and I know?

Sixty years separate my life from the lives of my grandchildren – 1940s and the 00s.

My world.

They hear my stories of childhood when children roamed the world safely. My Schwinn bike and later hitchhiking thumb were all I needed to explore my city of 70,000 people. Be home by supper, live by the Golden Rule, and follow the Boy Scout Oath and Law were my guidelines.

 Boy Scout Oath and Law

The adults in our neighborhood were surrogate parents to the 26 children who lived up and down our block and I obeyed them as I did my parents. At school, teachers led us in the Pledge and the 23rd Psalm every morning. We said “please and thank you” to the ladies who served our lunch. And when Miss Phillips, our principal, told us to take cover under our classroom desks during civil defense drills, we obediently did so. Teachers, principals, Sunday school teachers, pastors, and the judge who lived next door were beacons to me and my friends. If we behaved ourselves and got good grades in school, we would grow up to be like them and take our places in a better America.

It was an honor to meet our Governor. I knew our mayor. And my classmates formed the letters “Hi Ike” on the playground when President Eisenhower flew overhead. That evening, I saw the President walking with minimal escort at the All-Iowa Fair.

The running back on our football team was black, the left tackle was Lebanese, the tight end was a Mormon. Parents of my closest friends were doctors, lawyers, salespeople, and tradesmen. These were facts not things we thought about.

That world did not dissolve easily. Even when our government told lies about Viet Nam, JFK/MLK/RFK were assassinated, Watergate crashed around Nixon, Clinton lied, and GW Bush made up stories about weapons of mass destruction, government gone wrong did not tarnish our self-evident truths. When I once shook hands with former-President Clinton and Mrs. Clinton, I still respected the office held while marveling at their up-close personalities and his long fingers.

Although we knew the world was not perfect, the “American Dream” of our grandparents and parents still beckoned us forward. School was our ladder and higher education was our springboard to a standard of living and quality of life that promised to be better than generations before. And it all came true.

Their world.

My grandchildren tell me their stories. Roaming their world is limited to a radius of several blocks and they will never trust getting into a stranger’s car. Children are victims of depravity in their world; they are assaulted, abused, and killed. These children are not scouts and attend church perhaps once each year. They walk to parks and shops but only in groups, never alone. Today’s media tells frequent stories of children, especially girls, who disappear or euphemistically go missing.

Their school is not a place of safety but of potential danger. Since their enrollment in school, there have been more than1,400 school shootings, more than 550 student deaths, and 1,200 wounded students. Their schools are locked down when a classmate brings a gun to school. They view school violence not as an if but a when. School as a safe place to be is no longer a true statement.

They do not have faith in law enforcement. They see innocent people arrested, jailed, and shot. Even in the smaller cities where they live, good cops are bruised by bad cops. “Officer Friendly” is no longer real to them.

Our nation’s leaders tell them that nightly news is false reporting, alternative facts are real, people of color and different faiths are not real Americans, and all justice is transactional. If the President comes to town, it is for a fundraiser or an attack rally, and my grandchildren stay away. Politicians serve special interests not the people. They would not shake hands with a President. There are few adults in their world serving as beacons.

One grandson is a college graduate and two granddaughters, and another grandson college students. They and their parents are trading significant student debt in the traditional belief that a college degree is a steppingstone into the American Dream though, with this trade they already know that single-family housing is distant in their future. They are not wide-eyed and dreamy but coldly aware that equaling their parents’ standard of living will be the struggle not surpassing it.

To our grandchildren, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not self-evident.

Teachers as role models for self-evident truths

If not taken for their face value, these absent truths can be demonstrated. Self-evident truths are evidentiary. We can prove them today by the ways people interact with other people. And teachers are in the perfect position to be role models for children and adults of all ages.

This is not difficult to do. Teachers do these things every day without chest thumping or attention seeking. These are ingrained in us as public educators.

  • We teach equality without bias or prejudice. We are not color or difference blind, but inclusive and respectful of the children we teach and of their families and their cultures. Our first task is to know and understand the children we teach so that we can meet their learning needs and through our teaching cause each child to learn. Every adult can fall victim to implicit biases at times. However, teachers are not every adult. We are trained to understand and avoid bias and to teach each child without prejudice.
  • We teach children to pursue life with a growth mindset. We teach We are trained in theories and principles of childhood education and apply them in daily instruction that always pushes and causes children to learn. A child’s learning potential is not fixed but is constantly available for growth. The continuum of early childhood education to high school graduation is a constant opportunity for us to help each child to grow and improve their knowledge, skills, and life dispositions.
  • We teach to empower their life with ambition. Every success begets more success. We teach and coach and direct and guide children in academics, activities, arts, and athletics. We are trained to develop the multiple intelligences of children and to bring out the best of their abilities. We value effort and improved outcomes knowing that we can help each experience teach a child that she has the power to decide her life’s goals.
  • We teach children to achieve their dreams by leaning forward. Every lesson is about what comes next in a child’s learning continuum. If we look backwards, it is to understand the child’s background information and preparation for new learning. Dreams are in the future not the past.
  • We teach truths holistically. The humanities matter because they tell real stories of life. Life is not always clean and pure, and the stories and literature used to education children tell how people have struggled. Our history certainly is not always clean and pure. We teach multiple perspectives without bias so that children can learn to see and evaluate complex issues for themselves. We teach skepticism and criticism so that children will not be beguiled.
  • We teach so that children are prepared for their adulthood in our world. There are no “freebies” for the children we teach, so “bootstrapping,” learning from experience, and making the most of opportunities are lessons that matter.
  • We teach with faith in community and the commonwealth. We teach children to view their communities synergistically. As individuals, they can only do so much, but as contributors to community they can do more. Each child receives benefit from the commonwealth and is bound to give back for the benefit of others. This makes our union of peoples and states successful.

The Big Duh!

My grandchildren are accurate and true in their observations and conclusions about out world today. The self-evident truths of our nation are difficult to find in the evening news or online news media. Together, they and I know that America and American values are being shaped not by self-evident truths but by the truth of self-interest.

They and I also know that we are what we do. If individuals mimic self-interested rather than self-evident truths, that is what individuals, then families, then communities become. Values beget intentions and intentions beget actions and actions create outcomes and outcomes reinforce values and on it goes. Our children and grandchildren deserve and need adults in their world who believe in and value self-evident truths. Role modeling matters and teachers can be role models for a better future for all children.

Slow Down, Enjoy the Aha Moments

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“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it” Ferris Bueller told us this truth. He is right about life in general and, as much as the movie mocked high school, he is right about schooling.

There is a baked-in pace to teaching and learning like the gear-locked speed of a roller coaster. The pace is firm and regulated on the uphill and then accelerates on the downhill. Riders are thrilled by the speed and the turns and loops. There is an instant “wow” before the pace automatically returns to slow and regulated for the next uphill. There is no time for a rider to enjoy the thrill. So, it is with teaching and learning. There is no time after the thrill of successful learning for “looking around” and enjoying the moment. We can do better because we know better.

What do we know?

In all successful learning there is a moment of insight when the brain understands a resolution of a problem or a question. Consider the “aha!” moment when a child’s face lights up or they “whoop!” with excitement or seem to collapse from the exertion into a happy place. That is the “aha!” of the physical effect of the brain making sense of disparate pieces of information or problematic steps in a sequence or seeing how the threads in a story fall into place and make sense. It is not simply that the child got to a right answer. It is the reality that she knows the process of getting there and can repeat it with confidence. It is “AHA!”

This is the moment teaching tries to achieve – aha! learning. It happens every day in every school and in all classrooms. However, many teachers may not recognize an “aha.” It is as if the teacher is so focused on teaching that she is head down and keeps putting tension upon the child to learn without seeing the “aha! when it happens. Sometimes we must remind ourselves what “aha” looks like, to recognize its characteristics, and then to stop when we see it, and enjoy the moment with and for the child.

Technically successful learning is an epistemic curiosity resolution. In short, “aha!” For a child, it looks like these –

  • Going quiet. A child who was anxious and fidgety about while working a problem or a storyline suddenly goes quiet and still. Instead of looking around wondering, she intensely focuses on her conclusion. She sees the success.
  • Gazing eyes snap into focus. A child is looking out the windows or at the ceiling seemingly unfocused on anything when suddenly her eyes snap back to work with a wide grinning smile.
  • Big eyes. Physiologically the eyes dilate as the brain realizes a breakthrough idea. The eyes say “wow!” It is the dopamine reward.
  • Got it! A child verbally erupts shouting “I get it now!” There is a dopamine squirt that comes with “aha! that sounds like joy and many children cannot help being loud when they “get it.”

What really happens in the “aha!” is a mental structural reorganization of thinking. It is pattern recognition. It is seeing what seemed disorganized and messy to be orderly and neat. It is finding the right words to explain what has happened. It is putting a solution into words and telling another a person “this is how it works.” It is the release of mental tension and frustration like the second you realize a headache stopped hurting.

What to do?

Value the struggle. Working through mental problem solving resembles building muscles. It is challenging work. It is fatiguing. It is frustrating. However, these are prerequisites to getting to “aha!” Tell children that they are on the right track. Help them to know what they know and what they do not know. Clue them in to finding connections to prior knowledge and to look for patterns and sequences.

Look at attempts positively. A child at a potter’s wheel trying to form a vase from a lump of clay is a good example of finding success through trials. That child must learn the technique and feel in the hands and fingers to successfully pull clay vertically with enough wall structure to hold a shape. There will be many failures before there is a success.

Use questions without providing answers. Ask – “At what point does this move from I understand into something that is hard or into the area of I do not know?” “What is this like? How is this similar to …?” “If you tried again, what would you do differently?” Say – “Let’s look at what you have and peel it back to where your answers were correct?” “If you asked a classmate for help, who would you ask? And what would you ask that person?” Asking questions keeps the struggle moving forward. Giving answers deprives a child of the dopamine that comes with their reaching a successful conclusion.

Then, when the child finally gets to “aha!” stop to enjoy the moment. Celebrate with and for the child. And quietly use the moment to reinforce your teaching skills that caused a child to learn.

The Big Duh!

Look at the children you are teaching. Remember that success begets success. In the years ahead, they will remember their “ahas!” and the teacher who helped them get to “aha!” And they will remember how the successes you caused gave them the steppingstones to many more successes. Taking the time to stop the speed of teaching and learning and celebrate an “aha!” moment is a lesson in living not just in learning.

The Value and Power of the Teacher’s Lane

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Contradictions are interesting. I see faces grimace or erupt in surprise when life contradicts their expectations. I see their eyes become furtive with side looks of uncertainty. And in response I hear them say “That is not my business. I need to stay in my lane.” I wonder if their looks and words express a fear of a wild world or an understanding of the safety of their prescribed lane. Life is not simple. Much like driving on a multi-lane, urban belt line highway when so many other drivers speed past us and swerve dramatically from one lane to another, being mindful of the lanes in our daily lives is important. We, all teachers, have a lane in this world that we need to value because it is a powerful lane.

What do we know?

We cause children to learn and, in their learning, to think and to ask questions and to inform their lives by what they learn. This is our lane. Many of us consider our teaching license to be our lane – “I teach 1st grade” or “I teach Algebra” or “… art.” However, a license only defines a subject or the grade level of children we teach. In truth, we teach children to learn, to think and to ask questions, and to apply what they learn to their living using the curriculum we are licensed to teach. We are pedagogues, first and foremost. If not, we teachers are only cloners of children in our own content knowledge images.

Teachers are masters of their teaching strategies. Our contracts narrow the subjects we teach; our pedagogy expands how we teach and cause children to learn. We are masters in using direct instruction to create knowledge, and inquiry and problem-based instruction to create context and personalization of each child’s understanding and application of knowledge. We use Bloom’s description of analysis and evaluation to teach children to dissect knowledge and better know its critical attributes. And we use Bloom’s final goal of synthesis to show children how to use their learning to create their own thinking pathways forward.

This is our lane. We teach children to think. Someday I would love to hear a colleague recognized as a wonderful pedagogue rather than a wonderful middle school teacher. We are teachers not teachers of.

What should we know about this? Teaching strategies are increasingly important.

I am mindful of a teacher’s lane these days when politics try to curtail what we teach and to define the outcomes of our public education. I read, more than is healthy to read, how political leaders and their followers display small-mindedness in calling out or suing or firing educators who do not follow their script. I see teachers at all levels, PK-12 and higher, under explicit and implicit attack personally and institutionally in attempts to narrow the scope and effects of teaching and learning. And it is appalling and it is wrong.

What they do not or cannot understand is that our professional lane is not to teach a particular point of view but to teach all children to understand point of view, to think about and evaluate point of view, and to establish their own informed point of view. We use teaching strategies based upon pure inquiry not biased inquiry. Life and its events will shape a child’s thinking and perspective. Our mission is met when children know how to apply thinking skills not in ensuring the prescribed results of their thinking. Those who would constrain public teaching try to constrain public thinking.

The Big Duh!

Public education has been and continues to be America’s best invention for building an informed citizenry. Our national Forefathers created Bill of Rights’ guardrails and due processes to protect freedoms of speech, assembly, and press. These are essential for a thinking populace. Further, they made public education a function of the states not the federal government. I appreciate this lane they created for public educators and encourage all teachers to value and pursue the wonderful opportunity the teaching lane gives us to cause all children to learn and think. Thinking children are our future’s hedge against the small-minded.