This article raised a point that I have found a source of frustration of a long time.  I feel that teachers are being pulled into two different directions and expected to bring everything together on their own.  There are varying ideas of how a good education should be delivered to students.  One method we are told to use is skills teaching.  We are told that students must master certain skills before they move on and are given a list of standards and benchmarks to judge student mastery.  To achieve this goal we are given skills based textbooks to use in the classroom.  The other method we are told to use asks us to integrate the curriculum seamlessly to provide rich growth and learning experiences while addressing issues such as diversity and differing abilities.  Both are good goals, but they are not easy to fit together.  The skills based textbooks teach a variety of themes for each subject, but the themes in the various subjects don’t coordinate.  Thus the teacher is left trying to create artificial connections.

I feel fortunate to be teaching in Springfield because our district seems to be on the leading edge of classroom practices and professional development.  Our district is going to great lengths to train each teacher in the current standards environment.  In addition, training such as Project LINCOL’N is offered to help teachers align all the various subjects with each other as well as with the standards.  These trainings are extremely helpful in showing teachers how to bring the two different goals together.  The one thing that I feel the district still needs to do is to adopt texts and materials for use in the classroom that align with each other across the curriculum and build from grade level to grade level.
 

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This article focuses more in depth on the same problem I discussed in the last article.  The line that jumped out at me was the quote from Michael Fullan that said "[t]he greatest problem faced by school districts and schools is not resistance to innovation, but the fragmentation, overload, and incoherence resulting from the uncritical acceptance of too many different innovations" (1991, p. 197).  This is exactly the point I was trying to make in my last reflection.

I feel the suggested shifts in staff development are exactly what we need.  School districts have to do more than train teachers and expect changes to happen.  Districts themselves and the educational materials the districts provide have to change along with the teachers.  All the parts of a school district have to align with each other before effective change can be made.
 

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In the first article by Judy Pace and Howard Gardner a couple of things jumped out at me. The first thing was the reference to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences theory. The school that I'm moving to this fall is a Multiple Intelligences theme school. They try to teach the curriculum using all the different learning styles. Having only visited the building a couple of times, I’m not sure that my impression is correct, but it didn’t look to me like the school used technology much to assist with these different learning styles. Their computer "lab" is a bunch of Apple IIes networked together in a hallway and I saw very few computers in the classroom. I am very encouraged to see how well the incorporation of technology fits in with the Multiple Intelligences because I feel that I can use this connection to affect a change in the building.

The other thing that jumped out at me was the practice of studying a few select themes in depth "rather than covering many topics superficially". I have felt for a long time that one of the problems in American education is that we try to cover too much in too little time. Students spend too much time reviewing what they covered in years past before they can move on to the next level of each topic. I know that schools in other countries teach fewer topics at a given grade level, but they spend a great deal of time making sure the students master what they are learning. This makes so much more sense to me than spending 2 weeks reviewing the principles of division, teaching them how to divide by double digits in the 3rd week, and then moving on to geometry the following week. Sure, everything you teach them this year will be reviewed next year and, hopefully, those students who didn’t get it this time around will get it next time, but what about the students who don’t get it next time? Why can’t we spend the time to make sure they master certain skills this year, and let them master other skills next year?

I found the second article, by Alexis Carrero, to be very inspiring. She loved school because she was allowed to think and to express herself in the projects she worked on. My classes work on projects throughout the year. I only hope my students find their projects as motivating and rewarding as Ms. Carrero.
 

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I found the positions in Chapter 8 to be encouraging on the one hand and a little overwhelming on the other. I have believed for many years that education should not be in the hands of bureaucrats who have no stake in the schools. For years legislators have jumped on some new idea or other that they thought will fix schools, and then mandated that all schools submit to these ideas. It has been my feeling that the only thing these legislators are truly accomplishing is getting their names linked to the word "education" so they can get reelected. In the process, more and more valuable instructional time is lost to the following of these mandates.

The true stakeholders in schools should be the ones to decide how those schools will run. The fact that more and more school districts are moving to site-based management is what I find encouraging. The overwhelming part is having to decide everything in committees. I have always been a "get it done now" kind of girl, and I find working with committees can often be frustrating because the time involved in coming to a consensus can be enormous. There are times when I feel decisions should be best left to one or two people so that the school can proceed with the business of teaching students. Hopefully, these decisions can be made by people who have a real stake in the school.

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