Committee of 10 Strikes Again!
Someone in the webinar I was doing today asked me to elaborate on the Committee of 10 that I mentioned in my presentation. Actually, she asked what we could do to influence the Committee of 10. When I made sure that she understood that the members of the Committee of 10 are all dead, I realized that she was asking a really important not-so-rhetorical question. When you stop and think about the fact that so much of the structure of the American high school is still in place from their work, it does make one stop to think: how can we influence the impact that the Committee of 10 still has?
posted by William Kist @ 5:55 PM >2 Comments 
2 Comments:
How interesting that you should bring this up, as I've been having similar discussions with colleagues about educational change, standards and policy.
I could blame the hold of the Committee of 10 that standardized our high schools 100 years ago will only change when every student has equal access to technology and screen print. Clearly, it is difficult for teachers to integrate technology when many classrooms lack computers and some may only have a token 4 outdated units.
But really I think the problem is deeper than that. I am wondering if our cultural beliefs about schools are clashing. The curriculum and standards we seem to work with were written for an industrial society. We may be living in the 21st century, but I'm not sure our current educational philosophy is progressive enough to keep up or even be a step ahead of the times.
Not only do we need to change what we do in schools, what we teach and how we organize classrooms, but I believe we will need to change how we think about education and how students learn.
This week we had discussions regarding implementeing a new RTI/IAT structure in our K-12 system. This led to me emphatically stating that secondary teachers need more time and collaboration to keep extensive documentation and differentiated instruction for 100+ students. This type of shift demands that our traditional, secondary schedule change. BUT, everyone just shrugged. Once again, we will be forced to implement new policies in an antiquated system...
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home