Stifling Creativity - “just stick to the curriculum”

[johnaries]

I don’t know what the Education system is like in New York or Florida, but I know that here in TN it pretty much sucks. I am also constantly amazed at some of the School Board decisions in states such as Texas and others which further limit’s a Teacher’s ability to Teach.

There are some here who cherry-pick individual experimental schools that have failed. Well, every time an experiment fails we learn something.

“Doctor, it hurts when I do this!”
“well, then, don’t do that!”

There are a lot of ideas and suggestions out there to improve the education process. How do we know which ones work unless we give them a chance to work?

A lot of people misunderstand and misrepresent the Race To the Top project. It was inspired by the X project. It was not meant to “revolutionize” education, it was meant to inspire “thinking outside the box” and create new ideas and new approaches.

It was meant to inspire Creativity in the Classroom.

Part of this new Creativity is listening and learning from successful teachers. How do you determine a Successful teacher? Well, obviously, by the progress their students make. Some people automatically get defensive and define this as a “blame the teacher” mentality. They refuse to see the potential benefits, and further refuse that they can learn how to be a better teacher, themselves, by following the examples of more effective teachers.

Good teachers should be celebrated, and should be emulated. Or at least other teachers should pay attention to what made them effective, and try to incorporate those successful techniques into their own Creative curriculum. Again, Teachers should be allowed to pursue a curriculum that they find Effective - in others words, they should be allowed to do WHAT WORKS rather than being restricted to what the State School Board dictates.

On a side note, I find it interesting that some Teachers are now arguing against standardized tests being applied to their own evaluations, when they never had a problem using standardized Mid-Term or Finals to evaluate their own students.

I agree! Standardized testing does not tell the whole story. Now that it’s part of your evaluation, maybe you’ll fight harder to apply more fair evaluations to your own students!

OTOH, I will admit that funding is a fundamental problem. Frankly, I cannot perceive any job that is more important than that of a Teacher. Or, at least, a GOOD teacher. IMHO, an effective teacher should receive as much as any CEO. There is no more noble profession. However, by that same logic, a really good Teacher isn’t doing it for the money. But it’s only human nature that we all want recognition for our efforts.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I was a Music Education major at Tenn Tech in the late ‘70’s. although I considered myself a Music Major, I was appalled that most of my education classes were primarily filled with young girls that were only looking for a “college guy” to marry and really didn’t care about education at all. I was also appalled at the Educational Skill by the Education professors, themselves. This prompted me to provide an addendum to an old adage: : “those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. THOSE WHO CAN’T TEACH, TEACH EDUCATION!”

In every position I have held since, I have ended up being a Trainer. In my current position, I am a Tech Support Trainer. Although my trainees are carefully screened before they even make it to my class, my job is not to train them to read instructions like a monkey - but to teach them how our systems work and teach them how to think and respond to new situations. Yes, I do use tests to evaluate them. I have found that the construction of a test can be very useful, and some cases I have used the tests themselves as learning opportunities.

One of the differences is that anything below 90% on my tests is a failing grade.

Also, I keep my boss updated on the progress of each employee. When I give the test (that I designed), it is never a surprise. I never teach to the test, the test reflects (on the record) what I already knew.

But, every time a student fails, I feel that I failed them. My first instinct is not that they were inadequate, but that I failed in my job to properly teach them.

So, when someone brings out the “blame Teachers first” argument, it rankles me and makes me wonder “why are you so defensive?”

[End Of The Road]

1. Because it no longer counts when teachers succeed.

They get alot of blame for the failures of the public school system, and very little credit for the enormous success of the public school system.

[johnaries]

4. YES, they SHOULD get credit!

Some people keep spinning Teacher Evaluations as "bad", neglecting the fact that it recognizes and REWARDS good teachers!

Shouldn't good teachers get the recognition they deserve?

[Odin2005]

2. Creativity is dangerous to the PTB, hence they wish to supress it.

They want our kids to be trained corporate droids, with a real Liberal Arts education being limited to the elites.

[johnaries]

6. Exactly. They only want worker drones.

The sad thing is that they can recruit many with disinformation to further their own means.

They infiltrate our ranks and convince some to work against our own creativity and interests.

Very sad,

[LawnLover]

3. School has rarely, if ever, inspired creativity

I remember only one time in my life where we were given an assignment to do something creatively interesting to me. In Junior High. We were tasked to write a short story. I wrote a story about cops and criminals. I got a C. My teacher was not happy that I wrote a crime story. I should have written something more lofty. About coming of age.

Talk about stifling creativity.

I now make my living writing fiction. About cops and criminals. So I managed to be creative despite the school system. And so will other creative kids.

[johnaries]

5. EXACTLY. Current "school board" curriculums squash creativity

Imagine a curriculum that allows a student to break out of the "norm" and actually learn.

But some people are so concerned with keeping the status quo in place that they don't really care about students actually learning.

[LawnLover]

8. I would've killed to go to a school like the one in FAME... nt.

[jpgray]

7. Read any studies on the "value-added modeling" tests? I have. I'll share:

…VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness should not be used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.

-National Academy of Sciences

VAM results should not serve as the sole or principal basis for making consequential decisions about teachers. There are many pitfalls to making causal attributions of teacher effectiveness on the basis of the kinds of data available from typical school districts. We still lack sufficient understanding of how seriously the different technical problems threaten the validity of such interpretations.

-Policy Information Center, Educational Testing Service

The estimates from VAM modeling of achievement will often be too imprecise to support some of the desired inferences…

The research base is currently insufficient to support the use of VAM for high-stakes decisions about individual teachers or schools.

-RAND Corporation

The above were referenced in the Economic Policy Council's report, Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. In the study, the authors argue:

For a variety of reasons, analyses of VAM results have led researchers to doubt whether the methodology can accurately identify more and less effective teachers. VAM estimates have proven to be unstable across statistical models, years, and classes that teachers teach. One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%. Another found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings in one year could only predict from 4% to 16% of the variation in such ratings in the following year. Thus, a teacher who appears to be very ineffective in one year might have a dramatically different result the following year. The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis. This runs counter to most people’s notions that the true quality of a teacher is likely to change very little over time and raises questions about whether what is measured is largely a “teacher effect” or the effect of a wide variety of other factors.

[mzteris]

9. I think the biggest problem is

that the teaching profession does not attract the brightest and the best. This is due in equal measures to the low salaries, the thankless nature of the job, the lack of prestige, and advancement opportunity.

I don't have it handy, but there was a study some years back that showed the majority of students entering Education colleges had - at best, "average" GPA's - as in C's.

That is NOT to say ALL teachers fit this description!!!

And then there's the stat saying fewer than 50% of teachers make it past five years in the classroom.

First - recruit the best.

Second - train them better.

Third - pay them more - MUCH more.

Fourth - Empower them to do what they were trained to do.