Classroom Community: A place where everyone learns and students care about and take responsibility for each other. Rules are designed to help the community function more effectively and achieve its goals, so community members help to establish the rules and remind each other why they are important.
Caring Experienced Professional Teachers: The two most important qualities for successful teaching are relationship and organization. When students feel that their teacher cares about then as human beings, they respond more positively to school. When a classroom and instruction are well organized so that students understand expectations they learn much more effectively. In my experience it takes three to five years of hard work for a teacher to learn how to bring these qualities to their classrooms.
Things that do not work:
Test Fest: The United States is caught up in a wave of testing and data collection, but no one has ever demonstrated the testing regime improves instruction or student learning and better prepares them for anything other than taking tests. All students really learn is that school is torture.
Skill Spill: To avoid discussion of what is important for students to know and why, curriculum in the United States has deteriorated into a focus on discombobulated and detextualized skill acquisition, or what it is more commonly known as Common Core. But children improve their reading when they love to read and because they desperately want to know what will happen to Harry or Katnis in the next chapter, not when they are forced to dissect micro-components of text (whatever they are).
Drill Kill: This approach to teaching (drilling basic skills) is based on the assumption that students either did not understand something because they were not paying attention or because they are too stupid to think. If we make them do it over and over again, they will learn through repetition or to avoid punishment. The approach seems to work for certain physical skills (shooting baskets, marching, or hitting tennis balls) and practice does make people more proficient as musicians and artists (but probably not if they experience it as punishment), but there is no evidence that drilling helps people understand complex ideas. On the other hand, constant drilling destroys enthusiasm and interest in learning. Drill kills.
Bore Snore: Boring teaching is a form of social control, not a necessary evil in conveying information. Its goal is to beat students into submission so they “behave.” Boring instruction is a pretense at education so schools can say, “we taught it but they didn’t learn it — therefore the problem must be them.”
Repeat Defeat: Extended school day. Summer school. Remedial classes — Drill ’em, kill ’em. Bore ’em, snore ’em. If at first it didn’t succeed, do it the same way again. Can you imagine a general or a football coach who employed this strategy? They wouldn’t last very long. This is a form of punishment, not an approach to teaching.
Fact Attack: If you say it fast — fact attack — the words almost rhyme. The myth behind “fact attack” is that somehow, if we present students with mountains of detail, cram it all in and threaten them with a test, it will all be absorbed. In chemistry, when a suspension is supersaturated, particles precipitate out at the same rate they are absorbed. The liquid just can’t hold anymore. In classrooms, most kids just give up. The others memorize data for the test and then trash it as quickly as possible.
Tech Dreck: If am right about how children learn and what does not work in classrooms, about the importance of caring teachers and classroom community, then the heavy investment in all the latest classroom technology and software is a BIG mistake. Students who are not motivated to learn are not going to be motivated by plugging them into “The Matrix.” They may be transfixed and controlled, but they are not learning to be thinking, creative, concerned, human beings.
Control Patrol: Metal detectors. Hall patrols. In-house detention. Bathroom passes. Five points off. Threatening calls home. Pile on the work. Give them another quiz. Test, test, test. Post the rules, recite, copy, and memorize them. Sign the rules. Your mother signs the rules. Rules, rules, rules, and more rules. And if you break the rules—WHAM!
Alan’s motto: You do not have to know this for the test. You need to know this for life.