20 Questions To Clarify Your Teaching In 2019

Who knows where education is going, but it’s not impossible to come up with some questions that might guide that evolution.

The following, then, are a collection of entirely subjective observations–well, not entirely subjective I guess. Or not any more than anyone else. We all see what we choose to see, and interpret it how we will. What we choose to ‘watch’ is as subjective as any takeaway from that observation. But we have to pause the machine long enough to stop and reflect, so here we are.

At TeachThought, I see a lot of ‘data.’ Scores of daily emails. Press releases. Tweets. ‘Social engagement.’ Newsletters. Books, blog posts, headlines, pins, traffic numbers and clicks (more on that part later), conferences, keynotes, RSS feeds, social readers, subreddits, and more. There really is a lot to this edificio called public education.

Traditional questions that teachers and administrators face exist–and will for the foreseeable future: How can we ‘move students’ from this performance level to that? How can we get every student to read on grade level? What can we do to improve parental communication? How can we motivate students? How should I manage my classroom?

But–fingers crossed–this is the kind of training you get in your school staff meeting, district-mandated PD, and Monday morning emails.

I thought then it’d make sense to look at the new kinds of questions education faces–questions that can either underscore or erode the function of a school in a given community. So here is one person’s take (mine). As learning trends indicate a kind of temporary pattern, we may be able to trace the arc of what was to wonder what might be in the immediate future.

1. What is the relationship between school and social justice?

The fact that this can be considered a ‘trend’ is probably more relevant than talking about it as a trend, but education has newfound relevance as ideas on literacy, equity, race, sexuality, gender, and more change faster than they have at any time in recent history.

Just as profession, race, and income are at the core of ‘racial issues’ (that really aren’t racial issues, but human issues which is why it’s impossible to segment them out that way), education has seen its untouchable image as savior, for some, erode. (See When Class Became More Important Than Race, for example.)

Instead of simply calling on schools to provide social justice, it is becoming clearer to the non-Paulo Freires of the world that education is also implicit in this cultural malaise. And it’s no longer just about race, or slapping a ‘socioeconomic’ label on things, but rather about seeing relationships and connecting a chaotic spread pattern of dots. The purpose of K-12 can’t be ‘college and career readiness’ any more than the purpose of literacy can be ‘word and sentence readiness.’

How should your classroom speak to or connect with current events? It should, right? Should education not inform massive social change? Illuminate it? Contextualize it? Equip us with strategies? Prevent suffering? Help people understand how to live better lives?

Promote strong communities?

2. What would maker ed look like in my classroom?

What is maker education? What would it look like in my classroom? Judging by traffic, clicks, and social media responses, a lot of you have this question.

And this is beautiful–this trend of educators as enablers and students as makers and classrooms as creative spaces where human beings actually produce something. Maybe most wonderfully, this trend reflects a subtle realization by education that perhaps proficiency of academic content isn’t as cutting-edge as it sounds. In merely allowing ‘making’ in classrooms, there is a kind of resignation that producing and creating and design are as valuable as listening, reading, and reflecting the priorities set by the teacher.

In a maker space, the maker is empowered and everyone else becomes an audience. This is not a small shift.

3. How should we teach with technology?

So some teachers are against technology in education. That’s not new. What might be interesting is that this isn’t as Ludditian as it seems. There is real concern by teachers about the money, training, and even effectiveness of education technology in ‘traditional classrooms.’ Education technology is neither good nor bad, but rather does or does not function to accomplish a task. (See here.)

This doesn’t even get at the consequence of the shoehorning of technology into dated learning models and curriculum forms not designed to accept it. Or maybe it does, and that’s the trend we’ll see moving forward. From the Jenkinson study (above):

“(Effective education technology integration) demands an understanding of how to best support student learning in an integrated, holistic way, and how to leverage technology to support this process; which, in turn, demands of us that we develop evaluative tools capable of capturing the learning process that occurs when students interact with technology.”

4. Why should we teach with technology? 

In other words, tech as a tool versus tech-for-the-sake-of-tech. This isn’t necessarily a 2014-only theme, but it seemed to have a different tone recently–not “hate edtech” but “why edtech?” Ask on twitter and you might get a lot of salty educators who make it their life’s work to stuff as much technology into a classroom as possible, but more and more, teachers want to know why.

Some of these questions are get-off-my-lawn pushback, but some questions are entirely reasomable, including: “How can we best use technology? How does it work? What does it allow, promote, and produce?”

5. What role should cultural issues play in ‘the classroom’?

This issue has been around for millenia–the idea of an ‘elite’ education haunts us as a society. Content-based curriculum has a conditioning effect. It assimilates knowledge, language, image–so many strands of how we think of ourselves and the world around us (something Jamelle Bouie hints at here):

“[C]ontrary to the implications of the burden of acting white and oppositional peer culture hypotheses that white students generally have superior standards for academic achievement and are embedded in peer groups that support and encourage academic striving the experiences described by some of our white [student] informants indicate the presence of a much less achievement-oriented academic culture.In interviews, white students describe ostracism from peers and apprehension from parents who want to avoid the perception of “elitism” that comes with children in gifted programs….