“What beliefs guide your work in your school?”
I ask that question over and over when I visit schools and talk to teachers and leaders. And I’m not so much wondering what exactly those beliefs are (though, that’s important) as much as whether or not there is some collective belief system that undergirds the practice, and subsequently, how that’s shared and manifested in the classroom.
Take, for example, Beaver Country Day School in Massachusetts.
At Beaver everything we do is student-centered and future-focused. We recognize today’s students live in a world that’s different from the world 25 to 30 years ago and education needs to respond – just as it did in the late 19th century in the face of the Industrial Revolution. We believe students need to develop essential new skills, what we call the New Basics: creative problem-solving, collaboration, iteration, visual communication, empathy, tech & media literacy, and presentation skills.
And it’s not just a list; it’s a culture.
Prioritizing the development of these skills must live everywhere in the school – in 7th grade math and in 11th grade English, in science and in art, on the stage and on the turf. To gauge effectiveness of this approach, we use a pretty simple measuring stick. At any given time, in any scenario, our students need to be able to answer two key questions: “What am I doing?” and “Why am I doing it?”
If you really want to change what you are doing in schools, one of the “new basics” is to state what you believe, and make sure it’s contextualized in the realities of living an learning in the modern world.
Image credit: Patrick Tomasso
Spot on as usual Will…When I had student teachers in my elementary classroom, used those exact questions, but added a third question…How will I know you learned it? And I told them the answer should never be…”because I got all the answers right”. I wanted kids to clearly articulate that they understood what it meant to know something and be able to demonstrate that learning. It led to some really good conversations about setting learning goals and demonstrating understanding.
Thanks for the comment, Kristen. “Learning” is fleeting if you can’t use it in some meaningful way.
It occurs to me that schools and districts would do well to ask these same questions when planning professional development experiences for teachers…. If the teachers in the midst of the process/workshop/presentation/activity can’t tell us what they are doing and why they are doing it (and how we and they will know they learned), then we certainly need to rethink PD.
That PD experience must also be 100% aligned with the belief system you are living in about student learning. It should also be centered on the same “new basics” from two lenses: understanding them personally as an adult learner, and the pedagogy of teaching them to children.
That’s a great comment, Gerald. No doubt, there needs to be alignment throughout the whole organization as to how those beliefs are borne out.
The third question which I find most useful is ‘What will you be doing next?’ That is a real hinge question in my view – if the students can answer that you know the dots are being joined.