Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing
We will be undertaking a process involving all stakeholders in defining a set of beliefs for Princess Anne Middle School. I am certainly capable of articulating my own set of beliefs, the beliefs which inform my leadership at PAMS, but I also believe there is great value in developing a shared set of beliefs. Regardless of what the process will result in, a quote I have heard in several places and at different times resonates as fundamental to what we should be doing in education:
"We should not be preparing students for our past, but rather for their future."
Ultimately, this is the main thing, and it manifests itself in many ways, most of which speak to a needed transformation in the way we do the business of education, a transformation that will result in classrooms that are very unfamiliar to us, at least if we judge them by the classrooms where we were taught back in our day. This transformation involves several shifts:
from students as consumers to students as producers
from knowledge acquisition to skills aquisition
from teacher-determined grading to standards-based grading
from regular doses of rote homework and worksheets to performance or project-based work completed in the classroom
from planning driven by high stakes tests like the Virginia SOLs to lesson design driven by challenging students to apply knowledge and develop thinking skills
from teacher-directed classrooms to student-centered classrooms.
Many other transitions and transformations are key to this important evolution in education. As parents most of us experienced our K-12 education in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, maybe even the 00s. One of the reasons we experience anxiety with the way our children are being taught is because it is so unfamiliar to us based on the way we were taught.
This unfamiliarity puts us in a difficult spot because we want to understand better, and the easiest way to do so is for our childrens' educational progress to be expressed to us in that familiar context. It doesn't make any sense, however, to educate our children the way we were educated. Their world is different: both their present one, and certainly their future one. It's just that simple. And as a result, we must change the way we teach children. That means we also must change the way we parent children, at least in the context of how we support their education. Challenging though it may be, we too must evolve so we can develop a better understanding of something we may never have experienced ourselves.