By Tracey

Since Travis used only one, can I have his remaining four?  Because I can think of at least nine things I would do to improve education if money wasn’t an issue.  I realize that’s a little unfair.  Maybe it’s a perk to being the last blogger to post to this meme?  The teacher in me can’t stand by and watch four perfectly good, fully-funded ways to improve education go to waste.  But, I’ll play fair.  I’ll follow the rules and attempt to squeeze in all that I can with some broad categories.  The 5 ways I’d improve education is by opening the school to serve the community, team teaching with smaller class sizes, authentic and meaningful learning through field experiences and community connections, an educator attitude check, and learning 21st century skills.  

1.  Opening the school to serve the community – Has anyone visited the nearby public library after school gets out?  There’s one located just blocks from my school and it is hopping between the hours of 3:00 and 6:00 pm.  No one likes to admit it, but our public libraries have turned into free public daycare for kids.  I occasionally walk in and bump into multitudes of familiar young faces.  Some are working on homework.  Most are waiting to use a computer.  And the library is anything but quiet.  While I’m pleased to see my students using the public library, and to see the library be a place where the community can go; it’s clear that there’s a much greater need in the community to have a place to go after school ends that’s open, safe, and free.  Let’s open up our schools to serve this purpose.  Students can stay to get help with homework and/or tutoring.  We could offer enrichment classes in art, drama, sports, dance, music, language, science, computers, etc.  Parents can also attend classes and gain computer skills, maybe learn English as a second language or learn a foreign language, take cooking classes, art, martial arts, etc.  The school building is a community space of learning and growth.  Why does this end at 3:00?  Just because the teachers are tired from a long day shouldn’t mean that the building closes down.  Within every community are people who have talents and expertise that can be shared.  We need to tap into those talents and bring the community together within the structure of the school building.  

In addition to after school enrichment and parent education classes, (Here’s where I’ll borrow of few of Travis’ leftovers.) we need to offer early education for kids ages birth to five.  Time and time again, research shows the benefits of early childhood education and how students without it start school behind their peers and never really catch up during the elementary years.  We need to keep the school library open before school and after school, and kids should be able to check out as many books as they want.  I hate to see my kids manage the 3-book limit policy at my school.  It doesn’t teach them responsibility, keep them from losing books, or encourage them to read.  It limits them.  And if money weren’t an issue, we’d have all the books and library staff needed to pull this off.  Lastly, if our school were open to serve the community, we would never be turning people away.  Since we don’t have the funds to pay for staff to supervise kids early in the morning before school begins, we unfortunately send them back home or give them a seat in the office where they are expected to be quiet.  The school should be a place where the community is always welcome.

2. Team-teaching with smaller classes –  It’s a normal everyday sight to see me running down the halls.  I know I’m breaking the rules and setting a bad example, but I’m not the only one.  I, and other teachers, run through the halls everyday, partly because our school is so massively huge, but also because we have too much to do and too little time to do it.  I scarf down my lunch in 15 minutes, stand in line at the copy machine, and race around to gather materials for all the lessons I teach in a day.  As an elementary teacher, I teach something new all day, every day.  A 45-minute planning period isn’t enough time to plan, prepare for my lessons, meet with other teachers, and review my students’ work to plan follow-up instruction.  Teachers are overworked.  When we’re overworked, we can’t keep up with our students.  We don’t see the gains they’ve made, their misconceptions, and what individual and specific needs they have to make the next important leap in their learning.  We can’t know them as learners.  A good teacher is one who knows his/her students well.  To do that, we need help.  Team-teaching, that is two teachers working together and meeting the needs of 30 or so kids, would help us to get all that needs to be done to prepare for lessons as well as give us the time to know our students and their needs.  Plus, having another colleague to bounce ideas off of is sure to improve instruction.

3.  Authentic and meaningful learning through field experiences and community connections –  Field trips should be frequent.  It saddens me to think of how many times I’ve taught a unit on geology, yet never taken my students to see Mt. St. Helens.  It’s too far and too expensive; yet think of how well my students would remember details about volcanoes by actually going to one.  The biggest hurdle to field trips is the transportation.  It’s very expensive, as classroom teachers have to find funding to pay the driver per hour and fuel per mile.  Plus, we have to be back in the district by 1:45 so that the bus driver can start taking high school kids home.  We could hire a charter bus and come back when we want, but that costs even more.  I don’t believe in field trips just for the sake of going somewhere; the field trip must enhance the learning, opening up the four walls of the classroom to the outside world.  Connecting with other community resources and bringing guest speakers into the classroom can also make the learning more authentic and meaningful to students.  These are the experiences that students remember, because it makes what we learn in the classroom real.

4.  An educator attitude check – We need to find an ethical, fair, and respectful way to move ineffective teachers out of classrooms.  We also need to find a respectful way to help teachers recognize and change their attitude when it gets in the way of having high expectations of their students.  Teachers are human and they have all the same unfortunate hang-ups that humans have.  Sometimes they think that kids of poverty don’t live in culturally rich environments and expect less from them academically.  I hear the words, “those kids” said all the time, and I know it’s not intended to be malicious, or racist, classist, or other inappropriate “–ist” but it’s there and it holds students back.  We need teachers to be honest with themselves and we need an environment that’s safe for nipping it at the bud.  Each of “those kids” only goes through school one time.  We need to offer them the most rigorous, enriching, and inspiring experience imaginable to help them become whatever they truly desire to become with nothing holding them back and no excuses.

5.  Learn 21^st century skills – I’m going to go ahead and take the bait and recommend that we all get laptops.  I know, there are a lot of ways this could fail and be a waste of money, but if it’s done right it can be extremely powerful and make all the difference to students and achievement gaps.  We don’t live in the same world we lived in when we sat through our teacher education classes.  The world changes so quickly, we don’t even know what jobs will be needed when our students graduate.  Twenty years from now, many of the jobs people will have are unimaginable to us today.  In order for students to be prepared for a world in which we don’t yet know, we have to teach our students to be self-motivated learners who can teach themselves.  They have to understand basic computer skills, and by that I mean understanding how to get reliable information, how to effectively communicate and collaborate with others, and how to be visually literate, creative and inventive.  And we, as educators, should be teaching them these skills.  So many teachers today don’t possess these skills because it was not essential to us when we were in school.  The world has changed, and we need to change with it.  We can no longer continue preparing students for a world that once was.  We need to model the learning behaviors to our students that keep them literate in an ever-changing world.