Educators- The Deeper Basics Part 1
Everyday, teachers all over the country go to schools to work with our children and youth. The current trends have school leaders running around evaluating their teachers using rubrics of all shapes and sizes. Our kids are tested more and more and the "rigor" of the curriculum keeps getting more and more difficult and more and more children are being told they are falling behind. The stress levels in schools as well as in many of our communities is extreme and in many areas.... TOXIC. We rank, we sort, we try to fix more and more of our children.
WE NEED TO PAUSE AND RE-THINK (RE-FEEL) WHAT WE ARE DOING!!!
In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. —Bertrand Russell
If we simply step back and watch are children are telling us that the "soil" we are raising them in is not one of health and growth!!
Listen to the words of Stephanie Pace Marshall as she writes about the much...Deeper Basics...
"'Why can’t Johnny and Susie read, write, and count?'
is the mantra of school reform.
To be sure, these prerequisite skills are essential for all future learning –
and they are not enough.Where are the voices that fear as much for the deeper basics –
the basics of the human mind, heart, and spirit?
Why aren’t we at least equally troubled by why Johnny and Susie can’t think, can’t slow down, can’t reflect,can’t sit still, can’t imagine, can’t create, and can’t play?
Why aren’t we deeply saddened that they can’t dance, or paint, or draw,or make up a story?
Why aren’t we worried that they can’t cope with frustration and conflict? That it is so easy for them to be bored, cynical, and distrusting of adults and that it is so difficult for them to express deep love, trust, and compassion?
Why are our hearts not heavy because their spirits cannot breathe, because they have not experienced the wonder and awe of the natural world, and because they do not know how and why they belong in the world?"
Our kids do not need to be fixed! They are navigating the school world that we....the adults have created for them. It is a world of high stress, of competition against one another and a world that ranks and sorts them into winners and losers!!
It is time for a re-visioning of what it is we do in our schools. Our kids are showing us they need something very different......
WILL WE HEAR THEM? CAN WE BEGIN TO THINK DIFFERENTLY?
"Fixing and helping create a distance between people, but we cannot serve at a distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected."
Helping, fixing and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. - Rachel Naomi Remen
Founder & Clinical Mental Health Provider at Awareness Behavioral Health
8 年It is really important for us to get back to teaching the individual rather than looking at what the scores state. Our children are our future who will eventually take care of all of us. Each child has a special gift to be developed and not only is it our responsibility to help them identify it, it is our responsibility to help them grow.
Engineer - Federal Aviation Administration
8 年I remember when state inspectors told our band director that the school building that we were in had just been condemned. https://jpklapatch.weebly.com/
Senior Education Consultant / CEO @ QDRIIC Innovation Educational Trainings | M. Ed (MLMED) Instructional Certification / R2D2 Creator Tony Dyson Chose Robert to Coach
8 年Exactly, the focus on nonusable and untransferable classroom massive data, rubrics that fall short, and tunnel vision, non human to human relationship based instruction has mad schools unsuccessful. Key points in this post, brings out several issues that educational institutions should think about and address through positive change. I suggest, administrators le your teachers have more time to discuss, interact, share issues of the curriculum and the classroom.., while making real world and meaningful instruction that can be applied into everyday work and lives. Mahalo for sharing, and Aloha! Robert E. Walker, M.Ed., Quad D Robotics Innovative Instruction Curriculum Author, Instructor, Trainer
The other night I met an Economist who is doing a lot of work analysing educational data and I spoke of how much damage it is doing because we are not looking at the developmental needs of the child; and that consequently we are failing to maximise children's development and setting them up for long-term failure. I described how the obsession with numeracy and literacy is suppressing proper develop of a full range of sensory motor skills. Even for vision development children are spending so much time doing close work too young that they are not developing proper binocular vision so that both eyes are working together to send equal messages to the brain. I could hear the penny dropping - a man that controls the funding streams who assesses good education from bad, actually knows nothing about how children learn.