“The New Vision for Education”
I know what you are thinking; maybe Chris has bitten of a little more than he can chew, at this moment in time that may be an accurate assumption. My hope is that over the next year or two of graduate school and a career of teaching I may somewhat scratch the surface. Over the past three weeks I have been researching and trying to wrap my head around this conundrum which is the “The New Vision for Education in America.” To further collude my own vision of education I am just returning from teaching for a year at a college in China. I had spent the previous 5 years as a financial planner, so China/teaching was a stretch.
After a year of teaching in China I had fell in love with the classroom. Also it seemed my mind had finally adapted and conformed to the pedagogy of education in China. I chuckled upon return to the United States, the first day of class I read we would be researching the American pedagogy and how it has evolved. I would need to rewire my brain again, let the work begin! The process has been a fun experience thus far; it was interesting to see how wrong my idea of education was before working in China. It is slightly liberating to see how much my ideas have evolved from even two months ago when I returned from China. Isn’t it funny how research and education keep you humbled and aware of how little you know.
In this post I want to share with you a few articles I stumbled upon during my research concerning the change in pedagogy. My hope for this blog is to chronicle my process of growing as a teacher and maybe along the way give my readers/colleagues a few topics and concerns to ponder.
I started my research in an effort to catch up with the new waves of education in America during the past year. I also studied some of the hot topics of education in America today. I was overwhelmed at the amount of information and the vast array of differing opinions, previously unaware to me after years of working in the financial industry. My notion, that stock analyst and economic advisers were the most opinionated writers, was mistaken; they have competition. As I have been researching I often reminisce to times back in my office eagerly reading the Wall Street Journal while enjoying a cup of coffee. This research was going to be fun! If you are familiar with No Child Left Behind , Race to the Top and President Obama's Vision for Education save time and skip the links. For those, like myself, I will try to make the process seamless for you by attaching a few hyperlinks to different resources along the way.
After reading these visions for education I was highly encouraged, but then reality set in, I was reminded of a small school in Liaocheng, China where I attempted to teach a course in Western Culture. It was a poor town with little access to many of the cutting edge technologies. It was tough teaching about another world to my students with only a piece of chalk and a blackboard. While reading about No Child Left Behind I thought of the plethora of low income school in Alabama and students with special needs that would struggle with many aspects of this program seeming painting over reality, thus leaving many children behind. The vision of Race to the Top is to invest in scaling up innovative teacher preparation and preparing students for tough competition in a global economy. I think of my Chinese freshman students and their rigorous class schedule. I would jokingly ask some students if they were preparing for a heavy weight-boxing match. Hmm, now that I think of it in a global context, maybe they were! Their schedule consisted of classes that started at 7:30 am only to end over 12 hours later.
I have attached an outline of Massachusetts plan for the Race to the Top program. The program was the best of the few states I researched. The program is center around instructing students in a manner where they will achieve proficiency on rigorous internationally bench-marked standards. The schools in Massachusetts, by expanding their comparison spectrum internationally, are able to get a precise measure of where their students and teachers stand among their peers globally. The change in the diameter of comparison helps set the bar of achievement higher for students in Massachusetts and their Race to the Top.
So you may be asking why all this change? Isn’t everything fine? In the beginning of the process I would have agreed. While studying at Wheaton College to become certified to teach in China I was succumbed to the thought our education system was light years behind all of Asia. After teaching for a year, the opposite seemed true. My students in China could memorize an entire textbook, but when it came to application they were like a Financial Planner sitting in the middle of a graduate level education class, lost and confused. The system of education in China seemed more like rote memorization than a refined learning process. But as I get deeper into research I have begun to see that we may be on a misdirected path ourselves in America. I found three visionary groups that helped shape my ideas of the new vision:
The thinkers of 21st century schools help shape my ideas of Critical Pedagogy
A unique group call new visions helped me think of teaching methodology that incorporate the community and promotes innovation. They involve the community in several ways through work prep programs and valuable internships, not your traditional classroom setting.
Randi Weingarten, who may become the president of the American Federation of Teachers, takes visions of community schools one step further. An article in the New York Times describes her envisioning schools that are open all day for tutoring, homework assistance, and even preschool and childcare.
I see the new vision as a proactive leap forward in keeping our educational system at the top of the world. It is time for our concept of education to evolve to fit in an ever-changing world. The old concept of rearing up young people, teaching them good manners and habits, while cultivating qualities of personality and thought is not a completed process. The new vision involves collective learning activities, online discussion groups, computer-based research, and convivial list servers while engaging students in activities that prepare them for tangible places in a global economy. In America we should celebrate diversity of learning and develop curriculum and assessment that models differentiated instruction to all.
So to sum up my thoughts of the new vision at this moment, "the new vision" incorporates technology and teaching skills that are differentiated and applicable to the global job market.
And if you are still not convinced read this older article about A Nation at Risk and see if it relates in today’s world.
