What is education? Why do we go to school?

There has been so much chatter on reimagining schools and what schools could be, but I’m a bit unsure of the outcomes we want school to have. When I was teaching - and I imagine this is true for most educators - I never cared much about the test scores. I wanted to know that when my students left our doors after graduation, we had given them the tools they would need to succeed not just in the workplace, but in life. Despite what others may think, teaching is and always will be so much more than academics. It’s about developing people. School is where we help to nurture young minds so that students might one day grow into thriving adults.

As a teacher, there was never much talk beyond the curriculum as to the outcomes we were hoping to achieve through our pedagogy and practice. Phrases were thrown out there like ‘high quality education’ or ‘21st century learning’, but the reality was that I never felt encouraged to think about the big picture - about how I truly might help my students to grow and thrive. In a system that still very much evaluates teaching and learning on test scores and graduation rates - I hope we use this moment in history to change the dialogue. What is the purpose of education? What is school? What should we change? What should we be rid of?

Here’s a question, or two, for school administrators: How can you inspire teachers to keep or rekindle the joy of teaching that brought them to the profession? How can you maximize time and resources while also keeping great educators in the classroom?

Read as Darcy uncovers three ways that administrators and coaches at every level can help retain and encourage teachers.

In education, most conversations regarding gamification usually focuses on making learning an actual game (i.e. like a video game). However, Jane's principles of any effective game inspired me to think about how we can apply those elements to any and all aspects of teaching and learning. I wanted to bake these into the design of the existing elements of the classroom.

Drawing on the 4 principles of effective games, I designed a quiz that would look just like a quiz but would be grounded in these 4 principles. This is what it looked like.

Key Points:

• To make sure we avoid tech burnout, we need to rethink how many ed-tech tools we use. And we need to refocus on how we deploy ed-tech to address problems.

• Pick ed-tech tools that help you do your job better, that make teaching and learning more fun, and are engaging.

• Shift your focus to what will be easiest for the users (students, parents/guardians) to use!

• We can spend less time teaching HOW to use a tool and more time supporting students as they create.

As the demands for more self-directed, personalized learning opportunities are being realized for students, we’ve long been on a quest to provide the same sort of opportunities for teachers.

Educators already engage in their own self-directed learning. The problem - they don’t get any credit for it. Instead, most educators can only get recertification hours towards their teaching license through the traditional means of sitting through (what are often) mandated workshops and lectures. Literally dubbed ‘seat hours’ this form of learning is often passive and completely dismisses the enormous amount of energy teachers put in to grow personally and professionally to best meet the needs of their students.

Covid has highlighted just how much effort teachers exert to adapt to meet the changing demands of the classroom. When faced with challenges, teachers often seek timely, relevant ideas to help ensure their students are getting what they need. Inspiration is coming from a variety of new types of sources. Twitter chats, Voxer book studies, Clubhouse, Edcamps, education blogs, Facebook live events with experts are just a few of the more modern outlets making it easier for teachers to grow and learn from one another.

Our question - how can we ensure we’re helping teachers to get credit from this sort of self-directed learning?

We attempted to capture how we run our workshops in this piece with Edutopia. From what we we've learned, just giving teachers time to reflect on pain points and the support to do something about them is all you really need to make the magic happen.