Reinventing the Education profession...
This was one my favorite reads of all. I couldn't stop nodding and agreeing with his personal experience as an educator because that's almost identical to what happened in my Teacher Preparation program. I couldn't believe it. Tony Wagner went through Harvard school of Education. I would have thought that they would be ahead of this game. But I guess a broke unchallenged system is broken everywhere.
My biggest take away from this chapter was the idea of "reinventing" the education profession. This sounded very scary because of how much havoc reinventing can cause on anything. I also thought about veteran teachers and how unfair it would be to tell someone who's been teaching for many years, that they have to do it differently. I know that would be a fight. With that said, I realize that there must be some casualties in reinventing anything. Change happens and we all must roll with the punches. We can't expect change/reinvention to come without a price. This price I think is reasonable since we will have better teachers, administrators and hopefully students.
I realize that sometimes it is not easy to look at yourself and say,"This is not working. Let me try something different." I know because I have seen a change in me that has caused me to think about how I would rate myself as an educator. I don't think I'm bad, but at the same time, I'm not sure if good. I want to know. This is why I think Tony Wagner's suggestion to reinvent the profession makes sense. We don't have to throw everything away. We just have to fine tune it and push for programs that will prepare us to teach in the real world and for the real world. We have to stop focusing on test and statistics that will not give us long term, maintainable results. What is good now might not be good in 2,3, or 4 years from now. But if we focus on committing to always staying relevant, coming to a consensus of what is rigor and focusing our attention on the problem we should be focusing on. I think we can do this.
This was one my favorite reads of all. I couldn't stop nodding and agreeing with his personal experience as an educator because that's almost identical to what happened in my Teacher Preparation program. I couldn't believe it. Tony Wagner went through Harvard school of Education. I would have thought that they would be ahead of this game. But I guess a broke unchallenged system is broken everywhere.
My biggest take away from this chapter was the idea of "reinventing" the education profession. This sounded very scary because of how much havoc reinventing can cause on anything. I also thought about veteran teachers and how unfair it would be to tell someone who's been teaching for many years, that they have to do it differently. I know that would be a fight. With that said, I realize that there must be some casualties in reinventing anything. Change happens and we all must roll with the punches. We can't expect change/reinvention to come without a price. This price I think is reasonable since we will have better teachers, administrators and hopefully students.
I realize that sometimes it is not easy to look at yourself and say,"This is not working. Let me try something different." I know because I have seen a change in me that has caused me to think about how I would rate myself as an educator. I don't think I'm bad, but at the same time, I'm not sure if good. I want to know. This is why I think Tony Wagner's suggestion to reinvent the profession makes sense. We don't have to throw everything away. We just have to fine tune it and push for programs that will prepare us to teach in the real world and for the real world. We have to stop focusing on test and statistics that will not give us long term, maintainable results. What is good now might not be good in 2,3, or 4 years from now. But if we focus on committing to always staying relevant, coming to a consensus of what is rigor and focusing our attention on the problem we should be focusing on. I think we can do this.