For those of us long on experience, thousands of classroom hours into our careers, we know teaching to be performance art, a kind of interactive public theater. A teacher armed with a high social and emotional quotient (SQ and EQ), a sense of humor, and a flair for the dramatic, is very likely a fan favorite among their students. Since so much of education is traditionally hours of tedium, volumes of content knowledge marketed as essential, and rote practice and procedure ad nauseam, an accomplished actor is a much appreciated distraction in an otherwise dull day. The great actors among us may be much loved, but great acting is not the same as great teaching. Often, it distracts us from meatier things.
There is an art to teaching, to effectively communicating complex ideas in the right order and way, to convincing a rational agent who is naturally becoming ever more skeptical of the inherent value in the object of their studies. This truth cannot be denied. The trick is to pair the ART of TEACHING with the SCIENCE of LEARNING. This is where things get tricky, even dicey, especially where this new form seems so distinct from what we have come to know as teaching and learning.
We are witness and subject to a transformational shift in knowledge creation, knowledge acquisition, and knowledge consumption. Children, once passive consumers of knowledge, now generate, modify, and share content. They possess the same tools of knowledge creation and distribution as a multinational corporation, a governmental agency, an academic institution, or an on-line syndicated daily paper. It's easy to understand why they demand a different classroom experience, and a different approach to learning.
Technology, often feared by parents, teachers, and school administrators alike as disruptive, distracting, even dangerous, is an essential tool in the lives of our young. For them, the tablet or phone is a democratizing force and game changer, turning notions of authority, especially as it pertains to knowledge creation and consumption, on its head. For teachers still working to manage the disparate needs of many individual learners, and numerous and multivariate skills and concepts, technology is another thing with which to reckon. This is changing across our profession, but we have a ways to go to fully integrate technology's potential in the classroom, and we're working on it.
So here we are in this new world. Content, once king of the classroom, is still important but is now rightfully a means more than an end in education. Skills and concepts, the how and why of things, take center stage. We problem solve best in groups, just as we do in our adult professional teams--more eyes and ears, more minds, more ways of thinking, more and better solutions. We leverage all the intelligence in a room. We are tasked now with inspiring, modeling, demonstrating, even instigating, habits of mind that allow our students, citizens of a dynamic world, to meet their futures well equipped. They must do so not only in pragmatic or mechanical terms, but in ethical terms. This is where art meets science in pedagogical terms.
If things are looking different in your child's classroom, it is so by both intention and design. A big part of our shift is the International Baccalaureate (IB), and we have devoted countless hours over the past few years to improving every aspect of our teaching, and your child's learning experience. This year we transition to a very different form of assessment, far from the start at a hundred and subtract, A-F variety with which we all grew up. Our goal is not only to assess learning, but to provide the kind of feedback that leads to better learning and better learner outcomes. The goal: the Art of Teaching and the Science of Learning...everyday...at Baldwin.
See you around campus.