"Little School House on the Prairie", you've all seen it and or read it. There it was, "The Little Red (School) House" on the Prairie. One room, rows, teacher's desk, drill and practice, agrarian schedule and the pot bellied stove in the corner. When the town grew, they added another room, and then another, and soon they had to add yet another Little School House on the other side of town. Soon there were lots of Little School Houses on the Prairie. Time slipped by and things changed. There was the Industrial Revolution, the railroad, huge immigration and migration, the automobile, electricity and the telephone. Now, the "Little School House on the Prairie" was in every town and in every city. So many changes in our growing country ... and so few changes in our schools.
We debate pedagogy, values, beliefs and whatever we understand to be important and to make a difference in what we do. Do we ask some basic questions about how we continue to educate youth? What is sensible about the "six period" day in the American high school? We don't learn this way-never have, never will. We do the same thing at the university in three and four unit classes stacked end to end or on top of each other in our ten-week quarters. We know that High Intensity Training works, but we don't even do that in teaching language. Who learns in fifty minute blocks where fifty percent of that time is wasted via distractions or off-task activities? The results are all around us, and are abysmal. We see the results in our classes in Teacher Education, but we just continue to "teach ahead", moving them forward into a system of mediocrity. We are all guilty-just by different degrees. We know that in an environment of intimacy vs. anonymity, the intimate environment wins every time. So why do our middle schools and high schools continue to have 1500-4000 students enrolled? Why do teachers reject block scheduling nearly every time they have the opportunity for change?
We know that when we ask "at risk" students, "how they made it," they always say it was because of a special person or mentor. We know that, when teachers know students and teachers know parents, and parents know teachers and teachers know each other, that special things happen. So why don't we allow this to happen? Okay, this is just scratching the surface. But now, back to where WE are. We should be employing strategies of rigor, strategies of mentoring, strategies of intimacy in learning, strategies in learning communities, strategies in providing the best experiences for future teachers. We should be building strategies for innovation that will not negate rigorous learning. Students love learning when they are successful. Although we have our doubts about the objectives of our sister universities that are offering programs via the Internet, at least they are doing something! WE need to shake ourselves, dip ourselves upside down in a giant vat of education and see what drips off when we emerge.
Business as usual will not, and cannot survive. It serves no one. We need to build from the ground up a better program, one that reaches into areas that we haven't really considered. What we have been doing is only marginally successful, so many of our students enter our program with preconceived ideas about what their classroom will be and how they will teach their students. Many change little during the year they are with us, and their belief systems continue to be rigid, and frankly in many cases quite frightening. Change does not require that we sacrifice educational integrity. It is only a risk because it puts into question all that we are, and have learned in a static, archaic and often parochial institutional environment. We spend so much time with strategic planning, P & R and Professional development only to emerge with a truly flawed "variation on theme". We can decide, that this is the time to do it, as all of our time is running short (mine especially), or we can again "tweak" what we are already doing, to make us feel like we are doing something important.
If what we do is truly important, and we know it to be important the results will be astounding. This works with students as well. We will ask all the "why" questions in this process, and our students will learn to ask and answer their own "why" questions. For now my teacher education colleagues-everywhere, consider "dismantling" the Little School House on the Prairie", and enter the twenty-first century.
