We can do better.

With the recent disappointing results demonstrating Australia’s flailing international education standards, there is likely to be much enraged debate from everyone.

Test scores, international and national, often feel like they exist for the sole purpose of keeping up appearances. We all need to appear to perform well and score highly, often regardless of whether these results reflect the consistent and overall performances of school.

So much focus is placed on the results of tests conducted out of a tiny portion of a teaching school year. Further, in order to ‘juke the stats’, teachers are required to ‘teach to the test’ which means returning to superficial rote learning of the ‘right phrases’ and ‘key words’. At the end of ‘test boot camp’, we return to ‘real teaching’, whatever everyone has decided that that is. Why the testing and real teaching are not aligned is the first major red flag.

Yes testing is important. Yes teaching test skills is important.

But to place such importance and base our educational debates on the results of tests is itself superficial.

Our education debate needs the voices of graduate teachers, of teachers who leave for another career, of leading teachers, of experienced teachers, of parents and experts.

Ask them what they think. Ask them what kind of education system they dream of.

Let’s be open to more than one way of educating our primary school kids. To assume that there is only one right way is to ignore the uniqueness of children and learning styles and pretend that we can address every child equally well. We can’t. With only one way, only a few types of children can succeed.

Let’s direct funding to smaller classes so that the ‘fad’ of Independent learning plans, can actually be sincere.

Parents, get involved, support discipline efforts, otherwise our jobs become a clumsy attempt to communicate shreds of information amongst the battle to crowd control and protect our own self respect. Disruptive behavior issues and attitudes are absolutely disruptive to learning and teaching.Teaching and controlling are not synonyms.

There is a too much talk about money and funding and tests.

Ask a student on any day of the week what they are learning and how they are learning it to find out about our education system. Inform reform with student and teacher dialogue.

I am a primary school teacher. I want to see true education reform that is varied and honest. I want sincere debate that goes beyond money and sensationalized blame. I want to teach children a curriculum that is simple and powerful. I want the time and space to monitor and individually help them. I don’t want to be squeezed by the system and pulled every which way until I can’t remember what my job was to start with. I want to do my job better.

We can do better.

‘Teaching is like trying to hold 35 corks underwater at once’

 

This quote is likely to elicit a few knowing chuckles.

Not only do we try to hold down student ‘corks’, but also the ‘corks’ of school management, administration, political changes and staff dynamics. 

Yet we lose or risk losing quality educators because the system itself squeezes and frustrates and pulls and stretches well meaning and highly educated teachers in all the wrong directions. There is little time spent in professional development, in continuing to understand how students learn or deeply developing subject knowledge. 

Instead, we are daily faced with the piles of documentation that we must keep but know and are told we will shred and do nothing productive with. The endless discipline issues that arise and interrupt teaching and learning. The enrolment and funding issues that often mean larger, less productive classes. The last minute planning and sketching of curriculum that leaves beginning teachers in the lurch. The pretense of progress and ‘individualised’ learning.

I know that most children will learn something. Some progress will be made somewhere. But we should stop accepting this vague ‘progress’ and turn our attention to strategies that will actually provide true individualised learning for EVERY child. Often the advanced children benefit from time or specialised classes but their brilliant work, we sometimes read and know we have added little to the natural existing talent.  The struggling students dominate the attention of the teachers in classrooms, and then there is the middle group of students, who quite frankly could probably continue learning on their own, from a computer.

And then the time poor teacher continues to feel perpetually frustrated that they aren’t able to really draw out and nurture and encourage the unique potential and strengths of each student- a task that cannot be replaced by a computer. 

I believe the proper and quality education of children is unbelievably important to the future quality of our society. I want to see alternative education systems.  I want to see the expectations of teachers to be truly teaching and not administrators, psychologists or crowd controllers. 

 

 

 

I don’t want more money for teaching.

‘So you have the corner kids and the stoop kids in one classroom and you pretend to teach them both, when really you’re not teaching any of them at all’

Season 4 of the ‘The Wire’ explores the educational context of a violent American drug dealing community. Many school scenes reflect some painfully realistic scenarios of even our Australian teaching context.

Our ‘stoop’ kids are the wallflowers, the quiet, obedient kids who try to learn something amongst the rabble of the ‘corner’ kids who dominate and drain teacher energy and class time. These are often kids with sad stories, serious and tough situations who do not respond or benefit from traditional school methods. I’m a primary school teacher in Victoria and I’ve seen this time and time again. I want to see real change, not only for these kids but for teachers- we want to teach, and we all want to teach well, but sometimes, within our current system, we just can’t.

I don’t want money to be the motivation behind teacher strikes.

How about we petition for strucural change- where there is no need for unpaid overtime and ridiculous amounts of marking and planning?

How about we de-clutter the curriculum?

How about politicians making federal and state decisions have a background in education and teaching?

How about a simple reporting system, with more parent involvement and support in achieving education goals and less reliance on jargon-laden assessment and reporting documents?

How about we are realistic about the role of teachers? We are trained in education theories, methods, assessment,  student learning and lesson planning. We study for 4 years. We are not crowd controllers or youth workers. We are not prepared to deal with many of the situations that we are confronted with, yet often this takes priority in the faint hope that some education will happen.

It is not like this in every school, but for where it is, on the fringes, we need to innovate and create a better strategy so students learn and teachers teach.

I hope we can refocus our industrial action efforts into changes that can reshape and redefine education in a true ‘revolution education’…beyond new school halls and pay bonuses.

I don’t want more pay until I feel that the system allows me to educate better.

Some lessons and ideas from the successful Finnish education system:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

Child Sponsorship

Community Development is people powered.

Development projects are made possible by the combination of financial and non-financial resources. These resources are used to champion the values of social justice against the oppression of poverty.The causes and impacts of poverty are complex, tangled in history, politics and the often-incomprehensible state of human nature.

Child sponsorship stands as one of the strongest and most popular forms of financial support for community development practices in response to poverty. It is fundraising with multiple functions for recipients and donors.

I contend that child sponsorship is not an easy practice to either dismiss or accept. It is beneficial as a form of aid and development with a community approach; however there have emerged concerning psychological impacts from the corollary functions of the program, in particular the donor-child relationship.

There remains important scope to continue innovating the practise, educating donors and the public and taking up arms against an infiltration of consumerist culture in community development practices.

Kaleidoscope.

A tiny, golden piece of magic.

Enchanted in a world of tiny brass trinkets, magic tricks and the hum of Covent garden marketeers, I found this Kaleidoscope. It swung around my neck on a leather cord and for four weeks dazzled me with infinite coloured possibilities- I was ‘The dreaming child’ (Isak Dinesen).