In this time of abundant school redesign, many of us are
thinking about the ideals of student experience and how those might be made
manifest in our existing schools or those we could start from scratch. For
those of us with a progressive bent, the tenets of the student-centered
classroom are an anchor to this. While this has spatial design and
student-teacher ratio ramifications, we need to also think about the redesign
of the teacher experience. If we want to
have authentically student-centered classrooms, we need to reconceive our
school cultures in relation to what the job of teacher means to those who are
filling it.
Student-centered classrooms are predicated on the philosophy
that skills are best developed and knowledge best obtained when students are
designing and producing products that require they show mastery of content and
skills. This is an active paradigm- contructivism- which prizes collaboration,
problem-solving, creativity, and application. Educators who have begun to fully
actualize this model’s potential report unparalleled student-buy in and skill
development and the evolution of a classroom culture that genuinely celebrates
collaboration and independent thinking. Imagine how energizing and gratifying teaching
would be if the same were asked of the educators? What if our schools could
take their fundamental organizing cue from the culture of student-centered classrooms
and were reconceived to be “teacher-centered” schools?
Let’s use project-based learning as the analogue to help us
imagine how the teacher-centered school would function. PBL has four central
tenants: student-choice is important; products must have a practical
application; considerable programming time is devoted to individual or small group
working time; and there is a facilitating presence which is supportive and
evaluative. If you have taught in this way, you know well its power for
creating student-buy in, skill development, and ultimately, community. You also
know just how difficult it is to effectively orchestrate. And, you know how
profoundly gratifying it is to see students engaged in the process of
envisioning, creating, refining, and presenting their products for your
summative assessments.
In the teacher-centered school, the daily classroom
“teaching” is the summative assessment; that is when the fruits of the
individual or group labor are made public, thus useful. What happens leading up
to that is what makes the teacher-centered school so radically different: it
dramatically increases the amount of teacher working time devoted to program
development- and has administrators who are devoted to active facilitation of
teacher collaboration and program design. The teacher-centered school assumes
that teachers will be better at their jobs if they are endeavoring to produce
content in a way that honors their intelligence, their drive to succeed, and
their creative powers.
And because the teacher-centered school sees deep teacher
success as the key to its viability- that is, the key to its delivery of deep
student learning- it prioritizes the structured time needed for those endeavors.
It’s not an add-on- it’s an integral component. It becomes part of the working
day and the school year, and teachers are paid accordingly. This means that
teachers have their “planning periods,” but are also meeting collaboratively
after school, and that pre- and post-planning times in the summer are substantially
expanded. They are working more hours, thus they would get paid more. What creative, energetic educator would not
sign up for that?
Could this be a paradigm for our future schools? Its’ power,
in part, is that it elevates teaching and it would draw more of the creative
class into the field. Most importantly, however, is that it would be one of the
lynch-pins in creating the type of curriculum which will truly deliver the
skill development and life-long learning that progressive school reformers
value. Think about it, if you could start from scratch, wouldn’t you want to
build a teacher-centered school?
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