Imagine if you will the following scenario:
A doctor enters one of her patient rooms and sitting in the
chair is a middle-aged man who is clearly having difficulty breathing. Her
first reaction is the man is having an asthma attack. But, being a good
practitioner and being trained in evidence-based decisions, she quickly and
efficiently carries out a few additional tests to confirm her suspicions.
Within minutes she knows that in fact this male is having a serious asthma
attack that appears to be increasing in severity. Luckily she has the answer, a
cure that alleviates the symptoms, and restores this man’s breathing to normal.
Now, all she has to do is find that plant that contains the
active ingredient, grind it up, extract and purify the compound. It shouldn’t
take more than 1 hour given the advances in technology around plant
purification techniques. Luckily, she also took a one-day workshop in the
process about three weeks ago. While there was no oversight to ensure she could
do the procedure, she was a professional and felt she could perform the
purification process with no further support. And, if all else failed she could
download the PowerPoint presentation and figure it out. After all, that how she
had always done it.
Meanwhile, the patient continues to gasp for air.
Now most people would agree the first paragraph of our
scenario is a plausible and quite likely a common occurrence in a Doctor’s
office or an Emergency Ward of a hospital. The second paragraph verges on being
ridiculous in terms of the existing practices now used in medicine. But, for
many readers who find themselves in the field of Education, a simple switch of
the context to a school makes this story reflect the current reality in
schools.
We expect the teacher to do it all.
From planning the lesson, accommodating individual
differences, addressing inappropriate behavior, keep current on learning and
assessment, actively integrate technology and perform the roles of counselor,
keeper of the common values held by our society and beyond …. well, the job is
somewhat overwhelming at the best of times. With the advent of the Internet,
curator of information, publisher of resources customized to their students and
at the same time save the system money by not buying resources has been added
to the list.
While being a curator, publisher and right-wing budget
slashing economist is not impossible. And to be honest, many teachers have
migrated to doing this with websites, photocopied pages from various books
(which is now legal in Canada) and a mixture of other resources. This is a safe
place to hide from the much larger, and I would argue more important, task of
teaching. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to do it. Take our
Doctor in the above scenario. Just because she can make the drug to save the
patient, doesn’t mean she does. Her time is used in a much more efficient
manner by administering and prescribing the medication. She is doing what she
has been trained to do.
Teachers are not trained to make educational resources.
There is not one course in an Education program on making high quality,
pedagogically appropriate resources. You are trained on how people learn, how
to create engaging lessons from existing material and how to assessment student
achievement against a given curriculum. There are skills that develop from a
base of knowledge that over a career create master teachers.
Now, because everyone can make a webpage and access just
about anything on the InterWeb, it’s assumed teachers can just put together
their own resources. The Doctor isn’t expected to make the medication, why
should teachers be expected to create their own resources. That’s why we have
textbooks. That’s why the information in these books is aligned to the
curriculum to support the teacher and provide a range of learning opportunities
for students.
I know some of you are right now thinking that I’m a publisher
and have a vested interest in selling books. That is true, but right now I
think a far more important issue is getting our focus back on what should take
the teacher’s time. Staying up late to copy, combine and create resources that
already exist makes no sense to the long term survival of our teachers. Just as
asking doctors to make their own medicine makes no sense for them to do their
job. While it may be fun to cruise the InterWeb looking for cool ideas,
teachers are tired and succumbing to stress leave in alarming numbers. We need
to free up time for them. Let’s focus on teaching and learning, not searching
and compiling. Let’s give them the tools they need to get the job done in the
class during class time and not continually add more to their workload under
the disguise of individualized learning or differentiated instruction.
After all, the patient recovers because the doctor does what
she’s trained to do, not do something that is already done.
