What's worth knowing?

When I was a young teacher, the department head of math showed me his “Bible” . It was a series of laminated lesson plans for every course in the math programme. “I never have to plan another lesson”, he said, “and someday, this will be you.” “If that day ever comes”, I replied, “I’ll shoot myself.” (I was young, and not the charming and politic per-son that you know today!) Needless to say, the prospect of repeating the same embalmed lessons over and over for decades was a discouraging view of the future and not a particularly stimulating career plan. Like most teachers of my generation, I began to look for an alternative path. Around the same time, many educators were beginning to question the time honoured, textbook based approach to managing the process of student learning. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, in their groundbreaking book Teaching as a Subversive Activity, wrote in 1969 :

"Suppose all of the syllabi and curricula and text-books in all of the schools disappeared...then suppose that you decided to turn this ‘catastrophe’ into an opportunity to increase the relevance of schools. What would you do? We have a possibility for you to consider: suppose that you decide to have the entire ‘curriculum’ consist of questions. These questions would have to be worth seeking answers to not only from your point of view but, more importantly, from the point of view of the students.”

As noted above, Postman and Weingartner posed this radical suggestion in 1969. Almost a half a century later, we are still discussing the same thing—what’s worth knowing?

We live in an age of competing curricula. You can’t pick up the paper or enter into a discussion on schooling without someone extolling the virtues of some system or another (IGCSE, IB, AP, Montessori, Froebel, Waldorf—there are about as many models are there are schools!). When you get right down to it,  what it really is about is effective teaching, and productive learning.

What’s worth knowing? When I taught history there was an on-going debate between the student-centred process guys like me and the “history is a story” crowd. For them, my scattergun approach of allowing students to delve deeply into some topics and skip others altogether was historical sacrilege. Before I pat myself too soundly on the back though, I have to admit that I didn’t really know what I was doing! My students were engaged, and they learned lots of stuff, but if you asked me what my essential questions, critical concepts, and desired outcomes were, I would have struggled to articulate them.

The fact is, everything that you do, must be tied directly into important student outcomes. Time in school is too precious to be wasted on irrelevancies and we have to design our programmes, our assessments and our teaching and learning strategies to focus on answering the key questions across every discipline and grade level.

Good teachers do a lot of these things intuitively. Great teachers do them deliberately.

With thoughtful planning and reflection, we can continue to transform ourselves, our students, and the school from good to great. We can help our students to develop the skills and acquire the knowledge to tackle the essential questions in life.

The variance and evolution in their answers across disciplines and over time are a true measure of our success as educators— the only catch is, we just have to know what’s worth knowing!

Ten Years After

There are certain moments in your life that will always remain frozen in time. One, for me, is standing in the staff room of Bannockburn Montessori School in Toronto on September 11, 2001 and watching live coverage of the twin towers in flames. At the time, I don’t think that any of us fully understood the impact that the horrendous events of that day would have upon our collective western psyches.

Fast forward ten years and we can look back upon a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ramped up security at airports and borders, no fly lists, rendition and detention without trial, and even a boom in the “smaller than 3 ounces” toiletry business! Our world changed and swept us up along with it.

We have hardened. We are a little more closed, a little more cautious, and a little more wary of the “other”. There is no question but that one of the casualties of the events of that day was our openness and tolerance of those whose lives and values are different from our own. So, that is what happened to us, but what about our children?

My two young boys and my six grandchildren were not yet born on that September morning. Consequently, this life changing moment for us, was simply the creation of a “new normal” for them. As parents and educators it is our responsibility to help them to shape and define that new reality and to arm them with the values and attitudes that will make them positive and productive members of our increasingly global society.

At my school in Bermuda we pride ourselves on being a learning community that is committed to instilling compassion and respect for others. It is our responsibility to wean our children away from the excesses of our own fears and to begin to rebuild a more hopeful future.

On this tenth anniversary of 9/11, I hope that we can try as a community to begin to take the first steps to build new understandings and unity of purpose out of the ashes of tragedy. Our children deserve our best efforts.