Before I start this blog post I want you to know that I was a teacher for over 35 years. I think that most teachers do a great job, often in difficult circumstances, and are committed to helping children learn. Good teachers always have this feeling that whatever they do they could always do more, that there is always more to do. This is true, there is always more to learn, more to teach, more to get right.
Good teachers are not born, they are made. They are made by the experiences they have in the classroom, by learning how to handle behavior problems, by knowing when to push a child and when to back off. There are many, many things that teachers need to know that they do not learn in College. I believe that over my 35 years as a teacher I gradually learned how to be a better teacher. I certainly felt that, at the end of my career, I could handle any learning issue that came my way.
But something else changed as I became a better teacher. I became humble. I understood that I was merely one person in a child’s learning life and probably not such an important person at that. This was quite hard to come to terms with. After all,I had spent over 6 years training how to teach and had honed my skill through years of experience in the classroom. I knew that most teachers saw themselves as the primary source of learning for the children in their class. They felt that what they were teaching was of utmost importance and usefulness and that this information was critical to a child’s future.
I am not saying that what children learn in schools is not important to their future because,obviously, it is. But I am saying that it is time to put classroom learning into perspective and to stop teachers, and school systems, from setting the learning agenda on their own.
Let me explain.
It is well known that parental involvement in a child’s education is one of the main indicators of success for a child. Teachers know this and they do their best to get parents involved in their child’s education. They hold meeting, conferences, send letters home etc. etc. All in an effort to involve parents in schooling.
Note that I wrote ’schooling’ rather than ‘education’.
I wrote ’schooling’ because the vast majority of the ways teachers try to get parents involved relates to what is happening in the child’s school. Teachers ask parents to ‘read to their child’, to help with homework,to volunteer on field trips etc. These are all excellent activities but they are all school related.
What teachers do not do, mainly because the do not know how to do it, is to tell parents exactly how they can use their role as parent to help their child learn. Parents have no need to even visit a school (although I strongly recommend that they do!) to get involved in their child’s learning. Parents can do a host of things at home, in the park, with friends, that contribute to their child’s education.
In fact, the only way a child can reach his learning potential is if parents support education, not just ’schooling’, but ‘education’ in its broadest sense.
We need parents to step up to the plate and to help children learn; we need parents to understand exactly how they influence their child’s learning; we need parents who are willing to take control of their child’s education.
When parents do this two things will happen. First, children will have more opportunities to learn, and second teachers can be left to do what they do best, to teach the curriculum to children who are ready to learn.
Your child’s education is far too important to be left to teachers. What are you going to do about it?
