Scratching Out A New School, The End

I began this three-part blog by comparing the creation of a school from scratch to cooking from scratch.  In part one I presented the process I used to link the two and reveled the main ingredient in my school recipe:  people.  This ingredient was explained in detail in part two, where I laid out my vision for the student and staff structure of my school.  However, upon rereading part two today it became apparent I strayed a bit from my food analogy that was presented in part one.  Part three, therefore, will refocus on the idea of cooking up a school from scratch by sharing some ingredients used by many schools which I consider additives, preservatives, and artificial flavorings that would only diminish the wholesome, natural health of my school.  To begin, my school from scratch will not have:

GRADE LEVELS – I touched on this in part two.  Why do we place a student who reads 20 words a minute a “grade” ahead of a student who reads 120 words in the same minute?  Grade levels are an artificial flavoring that moves kids through school buildings without providing any measurable health benefits.  With respect to behavioral and academic needs, assigning kids to grade levels has enough abstractness to be completely meaningless to the students and their parents.  We tell kids to “act like a second grader” – yet do they, or we, even know exactly how a second grader should act?  To expand this category a bit, my school will also NOT have…

LABELS – We will not waste resources determining if a student is Title I, SPED, ADHD, or any other useless label that does nothing but give students, parents, and teachers an excuse to lower expectations for results.  Labels are akin to preservatives, which allow us to let food sit unused longer than we would leave unpreserved food untouched.  All students will carry the same label:  “learner”.  Some learners will achieve performance levels faster than others….but all will achieve.  Without labels, our school will need fewer….

COMMITTEES – Teachers carry a large enough burden trying to meet needs inside their classrooms; placing committee additives upon them only lessens their ability to provide healthy instruction.  And without committees we will waste less time in…

MEETINGS – Collaboration amongst staff to discuss reading instruction, math centers, or classroom management techniques?  Powerful.  Sitting around a table to figure out which days we should have potlucks and wear school colors?  Somebody shoot me.  Meetings are the processed food products of schools; everything about them seems real, but in the end they leave us feeling empty.  We make agendas, we get department reps, we follow protocols, we take notes, and at the end of the meeting…somebody is tasked with doing what he/she could have done alone without having to meet and gotten it done in less time than the meeting took.  If we could turn even 50% of meeting time into collaboration time, we could also eliminate another processed product my school will not have:

INSTRUCTIONAL SERIES – My school will NOT waste tens of thousands of dollars on a tool that decreases the flavor of a classroom.  Anyone can blandly turn the pages of a teacher’s manual, regurgitate the script contained within, and call himself a teacher; teachers in my school will chart their own courses towards standard achievement.  Breaking away from “the series” was one of the most powerful decisions I made as a classroom teacher.  It forced me to plan better, think harder, and create more than I ever had to as a page-turner.  More importantly, my students were forced to do the same.  Instructional series are written for the average student; I prefer teaching to produce exceptional students.  Which means we will also eliminate most….

TECHNOLOGICAL GADGETRY – I am not sure I can condense my entire argument against this monetary black hole in education into a paragraph.  My school will be extremely careful about the type and amount of computer technology we use in our instruction.  There is no bigger artificial flavoring in schools today, yet I know there is potential for academic growth via technology.  My concern lies with the vast amount of education our youngest students miss when staring at screens.  Consider this graphic on skills graduates will need to land a job:

I see at least seven items in each list that absolutely cannot be developed by staring at a screen, items that revolve around human interaction.  And with the way technology rapidly changes I often wonder why we immerse our young students into technology that will be obsolete by the time they reach high school.  My school will teach how to work, play, argue, and problem solve with other humans.  We will give interpersonal skills the same importance as academic skills.  We will teach kids to appreciate the world they actually live in.  We will be physically active.  In short, it will be hard to justify using machines that inhibit our basic philosophies about education.  Speaking of inhibit, a final ingredient our school will leave out of the batter is…

TEACHER UNIONS – I will continue for the three of you that have not just disgustedly spat on my blog.  Unions are an antiquated preservative that exist to preserve one thing – the unions.  An entity created to protect an uneducated workforce has managed to dupe an educated workforce into thinking we still need a union to take care of us.  Unions are not concerned about students, nor are they truly concerned about teachers.  Unions exist to keep union leaders in power and in money.  My money, your money, our money.  To keep themselves powerful the leaders hold the rest of us back, looking down upon outliers who work long hours or (gasp!) collaborate with administrators.  I have watched our local union invade my school building over the last five years, slowly eroding the spirit of teamwork and effort that used to make us a great educational facility.  We are now mediocre, with fewer and fewer staff willing to give without being guaranteed a give-back.  My school from scratch will fight against unionized mediocrity by striving for collaborative greatness.  We will work long hours and collaborate with administration to produce better students.  We will work with a spirit of giving more than we expect to get, the spirit that our country was built upon and has been protected with…..no thanks to unions.

And with that I will call my school from scratch officially……condemned, probably.  It concerns me that the list of things I would not have is longer than the list of what I would have; does it speak to my vision being incomplete or to the current state of most schools?  I suppose it doesn’t matter much, seeing as how this was supposed to be just a fun exercise.  In the end I feel as though most of the subjects I touched on could have had their own blog – and perhaps have come across as under-described.  I hope you enjoyed reading this, and I really hope you have done some thinking, or will do some thinking, about what does and does not make a school.

Scratching Out A New School, Part Next

In yesterday’s blog I poured the foundation for the school I would create from scratch, the foundation being people.  I am not interested in the size of the school, the layout of the hallways and classrooms, the colors, the gadgets, the lighting, or even the bathrooms.  The focus in my from-scratch school is on the humans who will teach and the humans who will learn.

My school from scratch will educate children ages pre-birth – ten years old.  We will educate pre-birth by connecting with expectant families through prenatal classes at our community hospital, explaining simple ways to strengthen reading skills at home during the infant and toddler stages of life.  We would not abandon families through these stages; we will offer…..no, require family participation in our Early Childhood classes within the first month after birth.  This bond with the family will continue throughout the ten years each child attends our school. 

During the 4-6 year-old stage students will begin to independently attend school, though the family will still be looked at as a partner in the educational process.  Our school will replace grade levels with developmentally appropriate academic and behavioral standards that students must meet.  Rather than a first grade teacher children would have a first teacher (4-6 year-old standards), a second teacher (7-8 year-old standards) and a third teacher (9-10 year-old standards).  The detailed explanation of this system would need its own blog post – trust me, I have the details.

A school created for the youngest learners will cater to young minds and bodies.  The school day will start (7:00-7:30ish) and end (2:00) earlier than traditional schools.  Up to four recess periods would be built into the daily schedule, with NO indoor recesses because of weather.  School will be in session for 12 months with at least 200 student contact days; long summers off will be replaced by frequent smaller breaks (the maximum break will be two weeks…..in early November).  The topic of the day, every day, will be F-U-N.  Our school will pulse with the philosophy that learning flourishes when students are having fun.

The ideas I have for this from-scratch school mean nothing without a dynamic staff of teachers in place.  The staff I envision would be as close as possible to a 50-50 split of male and female teachers.  I have no preference for one gender or the other….ok, fine, I prefer the ladies….but our youngest students deserve more male teachers than they currently get.  Also, I firmly believe that loading a staff too heavily with one gender poses threats to cohesiveness and moral; making learning fun requires a fun group of teachers who love their students and each other.  I will get in trouble for this, buuuuuuttttttt…….my school will need a young staff.  I am a few years away from not being qualified to teach at my own school because of my age.  The youngest students require an incredible amount of energy from their teachers, and in a school that will focus on fun each and every day, well – older bodies and spirits might not be able to provide what the students and I will demand.

The most important quality I will look for in a potential teacher is mindset; to be specific, a realistic mindset.  I do not want optimists, I am not interested in how full someone’s glass is, and I absolutely do not need to see a constant smile on everyone’s face.  I want teachers who can view a situation and see what is right and wrong, weigh both, and proclaim what CAN be done next.  Not necessarily proclaim a positive outcome – this is where the realistic part comes into play – but a real outcome that could be expected from whatever the circumstances may be.  The teachers in my school need to be upbeat, energetic, full of laughter and easy smiles, creative, playful…but not without the ability to call a spade a spade if necessary.

As I read and reread these paragraphs I cannot decide if I have been too detailed or too vague with my explanation of the people who make my school – somehow it feels like I have been both.  In a nutshell, I would create a school specifically for children ages 10 and under by assembling a staff of youngish men and women dedicated to teaching with fun while maintaining a realistic attitude about all things.  In tomorrow’s post I will point out what my school will NOT have; if I have not already written myself a ticket to the dark side of the moon with these first two diatribes, tomorrow could be the day.  Until then – thanks for reading.

Scratching Out A New School

For the past nine months I have spent an irreplaceable amount of time pondering what a school should look like.  My district passed a bond referendum last spring, enabling us to add a new wing to one of our elementary buildings.  As a member of the design team tasked with planning this new addition I toured facilities and met with architects in an effort to create a structure that would fit our students’ needs and our budget.  Being woefully underwhelmed at what our new “building” will be I have continued to longingly ponder exactly how I would construct a learning environment if given the true power to do so.

Intrigued was I with a lunchtime Twitter post posing this question:  “If you were to start a school from scratch, what would it look like?”  It has been roughly ten hours since I began to formulate an answer and somehow what I am about to write will sound nothing like my initial thoughts.  In fact, this has been a therapeutic exercise that has shifted my mindset about our future facility and what a school really is.

Two words kept gnawing at me all day while I mentally crafted my response to this question I had already been answering for weeks.  “From scratch” conjures the image of baking or cooking; recipes, ingredients, cookware, taste tests, a final product.  Much of the food I consume is created from scratch – I rarely eat out or buy processed foods – so my thoughts about creating a school began to align with the process of creating food…which led to a new question:  Why do I create my food from scratch?  It’s a healthy way to eat.  I feel more connected to food that I have created myself.  I have true ownership over the food I create with nearly all meats and vegetables used being gathered by my hands.  When I create my own food I have a much stronger desire to end with a high quality final product.  These answers about my food have, in turn, formed the vision for my school – my “from scratch” school will be healthy because of the connectivity and ownership felt by those striving to create a high quality final product.  My school will not be created out of bricks or wood.  Layout and design are irrelevant.  My school creation will start with people.

In my 18 years of teaching I have yet to see the size of a classroom engage or inspire a learner.  Nor have I heard students converse about the great natural lighting in this year’s classroom.  Too many educators get suckered into believing that things beyond themselves hold the greatest power in education.  From technological devices to ergonomic furniture to meditative music, nothing has a greater influence over a child’s development than the quality of the human connections in that child’s life.  I know, I know – natural light boosts test scores…but can it tell a good joke or redirect off-task behavior?  I would rather my own children be taught in a dark room by a personable teacher than in the sunshine by a teacher who doesn’t know when to laugh, when to grump, when to scold, and when to hug.  My school will be shaped by people, warmed and lit by people, and held together by people.  Well paid people I might add since, you know, we won’t have any heating or lighting expenses…’cause of the people warming and lighting the place.  Ugh, never mind.

This has become a three-part blog.  With today’s first part you have, hopefully, been given a taste of my school’s flavor with the knowledge of its main ingredient.  Tomorrow I will share the entire recipe, the human elements that will create this “from scratch” school.  Part three will be devoted to the ingredients that will stay in the cupboard, the features of schools I find unnecessary, wasteful, and impeding.  Thank you for reading.  Until tomorrow……