What can teaching teachers really be? What is innovation and innovative? We shared a lot through the semester do I thought I would continue to share. Here is a recent post from NPR that makes me ever more hopeful for innovative innovation!
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/06/17/414980239/a-vision-for-teacher-training-at-mit-west-point-meets-bell-labs?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150617
To connect the dots of my today’s reading by juxtaposing excerpts from M.Gold on W. Whitman’s teaching, C.Sanchez on Techer Training, and CNN on Bernie Sanders
A. Levine formerly president of Teachers’ College, Columbia University has tried to imagine a new kind of institution for training teachers. He envisions a combination West Point and Bell Labs, where researchers could study alongside future educators, learning what works and what’s effective in the classroom. Most education schools have such low admission standards and are of such poor quality, Levine says… “They’re old and dated.” (http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/06/17/414980239/a-vision-for-teacher-training-at-mit-west-point-meets-bell-labs?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150617 )
Walt Whitman was a terrible teacher, at least when judged according to the pedagogical standards of his day… violated most of the educational conventions of his era… Whitman refused to discipline his pupils with physical force. He opposed the kinds of rote, drill-based learning strategies popular among many teachers of the period, choosing instead to engage his students through a series of progressive educational techniques: open-ended conversations, question-and-answer sessions, and social games of baseball and tag. “… never have I seen humanity in so degraded a shape, as here. Ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit and dullness are the reigning gods of this deuced sink of despair.â (M. Gold: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/htmlreader/DHP/chap06.html#ch06 )
Brianna Keilar in today’s CNN writes of Bernie Sanders, candidate for Democratic nomination for the President of USA: [In 1969] He rails against “conservative” education — what he viewed as an ineffective and soulless learning environment where children must “sit still for 7 hours a day … and raise their hands when they have to go to the bathroom.” It was a theme he returned to repeatedly that year, denouncing authoritarian teaching styles. Often “a child has an old bitch of a teacher (and there are many of them) or perhaps (sic) he simply is not interested in school and would rather be doing other thing (sic).” ( http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/29/politics/bernie-sanders-own-words/index.html )
I wish the above contemporaries success in transforming the educational ideas! I guess in many ways it’ll be down to us, while in the open classroom… living lab…