Friday's Musings

All,

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the mixed messages I'm receiving at the moment, and more specifically about the mixed messages I'm receiving about instruction received in college classrooms, and how instruction "should" look in the K-12 classroom. Education professors (for the most part) seem to be stressing collaborative education techniques (both within the staff and within the students) and a progressive model of education as a social process that should be guided by student inquiry. That's not to say that they're trying to instill within Education majors their own philosophy. Instead, I would describe what they're doing as influencing students to think of themselves less like a "sage on the stage," and more of themselves as a "guide by the side." The message of my Education professors is steeply contrasted with the actual practices I've seen from professors and what's been recounted to me from friends and acquaintances. Far and away university professors employ stand and deliver style lessons. Maybe this really is the best way for young adults to learn. I don't know; my focus is on early adolescent education. There is little (constructive) social interaction or learning going on in large lecture halls beyond comparing answers to an example problem, and I see this as a problem. I'm no logistics whiz, so I can't offer any solutions on how to effectively reduce class sizes and increase social learning at the collegiate level. I see the pervasiveness of the stand and deliver style of lessons as counterproductive to widespread implementation of "progressive" education techniques in K-12 classrooms.

As School and Society (ELP 344) taught me, universities have had, and continue to have a lot of sway over public K-12 instruction. A little history, and some logic hopefully brings you to the same conclusion. In the early parts of the 20th Century, universities wanted to become more exclusive, and so helped encourage and implement tracking of middle and high school students of sorts and helped develop the system of standardized tests that have evolved into the SAT and ACT. These tests and the exclusivity of universities would seem to be the root of our country's amorous relationship with standardized tests and the college application process. Beyond that historical extrapolation we have the fact that in order for one to be "successful" in America one must earn a college degree. Though it is not necessarily the fault of higher education that a college diploma has become essential to be hired for most jobs, their influence on students is far-reaching. Students see a college diploma as the end of our education and the beginning of our careers. I'm not going to get into how education never ends, even when school does (at least, not today), seeing as you've probably heard it all before. By all measures, a college degree has become the tangible end goal of K-12 Education (psssh...who needs to actually learn anything when you have this awesome piece of paper with your name and some Latin on it?) and therefore inexorably influences how students view education, and more along the lines of this post, how teachers run their classrooms.

Education is by design a cyclical process. Teachers, who were once students, learned material in a certain fashion, and they in turn (sweeping generalization, I know. Sorry Mrs. Johnston.) teach it in much the same way. From what I've read and experienced in my years in the public education system, is that nowhere is this cyclical nature more apparent than in grading policies. I remember reading about grading practices in my Introduction to Middle Grades Education class (ECI 309) and how there is little valuable research on this aspect of education, but what research there is on the subject shows that teachers' grading practices most often mirrors grading practices of their former teachers. It is logically sound, then, to infer that teachers not only employ the grading techniques of their former teachers, but also their general instruction procedures. And so, it seems that we are stuck in a rut as far as true innovation, especially in regards to technology, in classroom instruction is concerned. Of course, part of this problem is only compounded by the ever-increasing amount of material that teachers are expected to cover and the data-driven obsession with standardized testing.

Maybe I'm naive in writing this post. I haven't exactly done a lot of traveling in and observation of American classrooms. So, as far as my "evidence" goes, it's limited at best. I don't know exactly where I've taken us on this post, but it's somewhere. I don't know, I just find it funny that universities are at the cutting edge in so many areas: technology, sciences, etc, and yet the teaching methods are so antiquated. It makes me scratch my head and wonder. Anyway, that is all. Have a good weekend everybody.

-Jason