Should teachers be held accountable for things that are impossible to do? Teachers know it’s impossible to make students alike in knowledge and skills. It’s like requiring everyone to run a mile in four minutes, punishing those who can’t do it, and requiring remediation classes for the slow ones even though they may be gifted in other areas.
Ever since the Nation At Risk Report in 1983, when the federal government started to exert excessive power over public education, teachers have been asked to standardize and make students alike in reading and math. What all students should know and be able to do is specified for each grade level. Standardized tests have been used to enforce this mandate. As a result, because it’s impossible to do, teachers are demoralized, student achievement remains flat, bullying, gangs, disruptive behavior, suicides and drop outs have increased. Many good teachers have also dropped out. Students, teachers and parents report that school has lost some very important things -- things that make teaching and learning exciting, challenging and fun. Teachers can no longer practice as professionals who interact with individual students and make decisions, but are now subordinate workers who must follow required and often scripted behaviors that don’t fit the needs of students in their classes. What if we hold teachers, parents and students jointly accountable for things that are possible to do? I work with a group of veteran teachers and committed parents who found a way to make school interesting, fun and exciting again. They call this approach, "Educating for Human Greatness." The basic concept is to stop trying to standardize students, like products on an assembly line, and to start helping students develop their positive differences, their individual powers of "greatness." It starts by building on student assets, what each child already knows and is good at doing. To do this, the teachers and parents found that a narrow, limited core curriculum is not adequate. A broad, unlimited set of subjects is needed to meet the needs of a huge variety of students. The teachers and parents further discovered that it is more useful to view hundreds of subjects as tools or a means of helping students grow in the powers of greatness, rather than to view them as goals or ends in and of themselves. Government mandated reading and math taught as testable "ends," rather than as tools of inquiry, has resulted in direct, high pressure, scripted instruction that leaves many students hating school and developing an aversion to learning. In interviews with thousands of parents, teachers at two schools in Northern Utah discovered three dimensions of human greatness that became priorities. They are shown below, with four more added, to become the seven fundamental powers of human greatness. All seven are possible to accomplish. They restore teaching as a respected profession. They are all "measurable" in one way or another: 1. The power of identity — help students develop their individual talents, gifts, interests, abilities, and self-worth as special contributors to the school, home, community and country. 2. The power of inquiry — develop curiosity, the power to ask good questions and to fall in love with learning. 3. The power of interaction — nurture respect, caring, communication and cooperation - the power of healthy relationships. 4. The power of initiative — help students develop discipline, will power and a passion to excel in something. 5. The power of imagination — develop creativity. 6. The power of intuition — help students sense truth with the heart. 7. The power of integrity — instill honesty and responsibility. The teachers and parents found that when they taught the above powers as goals, using many subjects as means, students learned basic skills much better and at the time and pace that is right for each one. Students engaged in self-chosen home study rather than teacher assigned home work. Teachers found that a good way to teach reading, writing and math is to help students develop an insatiable curiosity about something. Reading, math and writing taught as a process of inquiry and interaction are learned in a natural way without developing an aversion to them. When students become intensely curious about something, they usually want to observe, count, weigh, measure and compare things. Math is then learned in a natural way as a tool of inquiry. It is revolutionary to use a great variety of subjects as "tools" or a means of helping students grow in the powers of human greatness. When curriculum is viewed in this way, the teachers found that every child can excel in something. There is a considerable advantage in holding teachers and parents jointly accountable for things that are possible to do. When we change education to help students grow in the powers of human greatness, we become "the wind beneath their wings" and they soar higher than eagles. Each child surprises us with amazing, unique accomplishments. In the process of nurturing individual student greatness, parents and teachers also rise to a higher level of learning and teaching. You can help your children’s school become an Educating for Greatness school by introducing them to this revolutionary concept. Why not do it before more students are damaged or cheated by our government’s counterfeit "reforms?"
Lynn Stoddard, a retired educator, is a Founder of the Educating for Greatness Alliance. He can be reached at lstrd@yahoo.com.
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