What are we Really About?
Xerox used to run commercials which showed a change in the attitude of their company. They decided they were not a company which made photocopiers and fax machines, but that they were a company that allowed people to deal with their documents in ways that made life easier for them.
This opened up whole new worlds of business for them. They were no longer just about the technology, the machines. They were about making lives easier, finding innovative solutions to problems, and about working with companies to design custom solutions.
This begs the question: what are classrooms really about?
Are we about grammar skills and math problems? Are we about lists of outcomes to be covered? If so, no wonder kids have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning to crawl through our doors. If we are about hundreds of discrete skills that have absolutely nothing to do with their daily lives; if we attempt to fill their heads with facts they just might need some day, it is no wonder we are losing the attention, the concerns, the hearts of our students.
Classrooms need to be about passion.
Classrooms need to be about inquiry.
Classrooms need to be about connections and the stories these bring into our lives.
Just as Xerox learned that it isn't about the machines it makes, classrooms need to learn that we aren't about checklists and tests. Do we need to teach? Certainly. Do we need to test and
evaluate? No accountability and no dollars without them and they aren't going away. But this doesn't mean that these need to be what our spaces are about. When kids leave my room and go upstairs to the highschool section of our school, I want them to leave with questions, with concerns about their world, and with ideas about how to find answers. I want them to get out of my room with a real sense of people's lives around the globe, their past, present, and the possibilities for the future. I want them to have learned math, science, channels to find information, and to have a voice in the raging global conversations.
I want them to be passionate. I want them to know where to look for answers and how to find them. I want them to feel connected to people who live twelve time zones away from them and to know something of their daily lives.
What are the words that sum up what your space is really about?
Photos from:
http://www.photo-passion.eu/
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070110.html
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