I found the content and perspectives presented in the articles and videos interesting and relevant to my roles as an elementary teacher and graduate student.
As I may have shared before, my school’s mission reflects an understanding of the importance of preparing our next generation’s knowledge workers. The mission statement phrases this as a “global, knowledge-based future.” We revamped our school’s strategic plan with a consulting group from Oregon a few years ago and they helped us create a new mission statement. Yes, it contains some good buzz words but honestly I’m not sure how many parents, or even teachers, quite know what it means! I found Broadfoot’s and Jarvis’s articles, as well as other material throughout this course, helpful to understand the society that students are preparing for and the knowledge and skills they will need for success.
Our school is developing a more rigorous curriculum to meet the demands of our global, knowledge society by adopting the International Baccalaureate Programme. This curricular framework guides the effective implementation of transdisciplinary thematic units which emphasize higher order thinking skills and student ownership of learning. This curriculum agrees with the more globalist-minded international education perspective as discussed in Cambridge and Thompson’s article. However, the framework greatly differs from the Australian curriculum described in the video. This is certainly not similar to a national curriculum, and instead provides unlimited creativity and self-selection of content. I think the Australian curriculum’s online setup seemed very beneficial for teachers to access resources and cross-check for accountability. I found this curriculum more appealing than the standard course of study or the IB framework. I am interested to see what happens with the national math standards we will soon follow in North Carolina. I’m wondering about how the guide will me presented and if resources will be linked. There is a lot of buzz about this among teachers at my school right now.
I was intrigued by the theme of how societal factors affect achievement. DeCoker reported on the ways in which Japanese and American teachers have different expectations for student behavior with surprisingly less strict discipline practices in Japan. The Chinese teacher working in Ohio also commented on how the American students do not work as hard. The Finnish exchange student also remarked on this contrast and that her school system will not even recognize credits from the American high school. In the video about the Australian curriculum we hear that the US is significantly behind the performance of other schools. The article about Finland’s educational success also notes this but importantly mentions the weight of societal factors. Unlike many of these other countries with homogeneous populations and strong like national identities, America is greatly diverse by ethnicities, socioeconomics and qualities of schools. These factors are undeniably influential upon our achievement statistics. Zhao’s book explicates all of this more thoroughly.
This topic inspires me to consider the affecting variables. Teachers cannot change the influence of these factors but we can focus on another factor for which we have some control: school community. If large-scale community factors carry such weight, I think we as teachers should place more emphasis on creating a nurturing, rigorous, supportive and accessible learning community in our own small-scale classrooms. I believe this can contribute greatly in our local arena. I would like to see more emphasis on this aspect of the learning society to instill the desire and motivation for students to take risks in their learning and seek more knowledge because they believe they can and deserve to.
I enjoyed the articles about lifelong learners and their important role in knowledge societies. As graduate students we are lifelong learners. I think an environment which is rich in professional growth has numerous reverberating positive effects for the community. My co-teacher and I are both very interested in research about brain development, bridging transdisciplinary themes, incorporating meaningful literature and of course sharing our findings and inspirations. This also means allowing and trusting each other to take risks and try new ideas. I feel this work environment makes us feel more professional and knowledgeable and reinforces our commitment to our students. I think this is a very important practice and mind state that should be encouraged by school leaders.
Lastly, I just want to gripe that I feel annoyed by the frequent comments about what countries, states etc. students can find on a map as a significant indicator of academic success. I do not think this comparison is fair to students of different learning styles. Visual spatial learning is only one of Gardner’s nine (revised) multiple intelligences. As someone who has long struggled with memorization skills, I would not want my academic intelligence judged by such an arbitrary measure. If we have already recognized the value of higher order evaluative and critical thinking skills, why do we keep coming back to this example?
The article about the Japanese teachers reminded me of another article I read awhile back. It was about the reaction to a picture of a brand new state of the art sports arena that was being shown to a large group of Japanese business people. The author of the article was disappointed because the Japanese were completely distracted by the number of cars in the parking lot and not at all interested in the architectural design of the structure. In this article the Japanese teachers were more struck by our cultural differences than by our curricular differences. As I read Zhao, I am too. I am glad to learn of my misconceptions. I had always imagined (and perhaps been influenced by stereotypes) that a Japanese classroom would be quiet and disciplined which sounds painful to me.
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