This is the first of
three posts I will be making over the next few weeks concerning one of the most
prevalent problems in teaching today.
Our educational system is a mass of contradiction. It is
peopled by smart, dedicated professionals at every level. It has access to
jaw-dropping technology and is supported by massive amounts of money from
local, state and federal agencies. It has every reason to be the best
educational system in the world. Yet the plain truth is, nationally the system is failing. Too high a percentage
of our students are failing because, in spite of all of this, we are failing our students.
There’s no point in citing the statistics; we’ve all heard
plenty about falling test scores, dropout rates and teen illiteracy. When we
hear such things, it hurts. And it hurts more because we have the money, the
knowledge and the people we need to succeed. So although there are high-achieving schools and school
districts, compared to what we should be achieving nationally, the system is
failing.
Nearly all educational professionals are clear on the
results they’d like to see: students interested and involved in learning,
higher academic achievement, lower absenteeism, and improved discipline. But,
statistically, we can all see that things are getting worse—not better.
Pinpointing
the Problem: The “How-To” Gap
Our teachers are usually well-schooled in academic subjects,
child psychology and educational theory. They graduate from college full of
knowledge, dedication and enthusiasm. But when they get to their first day of
school, they find that they have little idea how to apply what they know in the classroom. They don’t know how to connect the theories they learned
to the results they want to achieve. They don’t know which tool to use to
accomplish which task. There literally is a “how-to” gap.
Experienced teachers, feeling the pain of this gap, take
seminars and workshops, only to wind up with notebooks on the shelf and the
same old frustrations in their classrooms. The frustration comes in realizing
they “know” 90 percent of what they need. They’ve been taught theories and methods,
yet they’re missing the final ten percent of what they need to “reach” the
kids. They’re missing the delivery—the
things that spark the kids’ interest in a subject, help them learn, make the
subject meaningful and get them excited about it. The "how-to" gap
remains.
I will discuss how we can close the “how-to” gap in part two
of this series.