What are yours?
This I Believe
1. The most important things we do as teachers: the moments that our students will carry with them for the rest of their lives, the truly meaningful actions that define who
we are as teachers – cannot be measured.
If you think they can then you don’t understand what we do.
2. Learning to love learning is more important that
any information with which we can try and fill a child’s head.
3. Children are born learners. They are naturally curious and creative. Teachers should do everything in their power
to avoid participating in practices that stifle that curiosity and creativity.
4. Measuring learning is significantly less
important than actually learning. It
should be done only when doing so when the measurement is helpful to the
learner.
5. Grades do not help students learn. They help adults rank, sort, and judge
students. Students need meaningful
feedback from others to learn. Numbers
and letters placed on top of a test are not meaningful feedback.
6. The decisions we make in schools should be based
upon what is best for the children we serve and not upon what is popular with
parents, politicians, colleges, and corporations.
7. Teachers need to get better. Every teacher should be pursuing the goal of
improving as a professional. Teachers
should be models of life-long learning.
If we focused our energy on providing the support, resources, and
inspiration for EVERY teacher to constantly improve instead of identifying and
firing those teachers who are “bad” using sketchy test data, every student
would benefit immensely.
8. Math is not a series of procedures to be
followed in order to arrive at correct answers.
Some think they are not good at math because they couldn’t memorize
procedure. Others think they are great
mathematicians because they could. In
reality, there are many great mathematicians for whom calculation is not a
great strength. And there are many great
calculators who are not good mathematicians.
We need to change how we present mathematics to our students so that “school
math” and “real math” are one and the same.
9. We live in a time of ubiquitous technology. Student learning should happen in an
environment that reflects that fact, but technology is just the tool of our
time. Good teaching is not determined by
the technology used but by the quality of the pedagogy. The basis of good teaching has been the same
for millennia, but it may look very different in the 21st Century
than it did when Socrates was teaching Plato.
Just as the Socratic Method was grounded in inquiry, our pedagogy should
be student centered and driven by inquiry.
10. Decisions should be based on data, research, and
experience. Too often decisions are
based on data that is most convenient to obtain, cheapest to gather, or
cherry-picked to prove a political point.
This does a terrible disservice to our children. Using data incorrectly is more harmful than
not using it at all, and some things cannot be quantified. Just because we cannot measure what is truly
important (see #1) does not mean that we should put importance on what we can
measure.