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Understanding the Past, Creating the Present, Imagining the Future
Understanding the Past, Creating the Present, Imagining the Future
“Give me full autonomy as to how I teach, and I will get our students from A to Z. If I can’t get 90% of our students passing by the end of the year, you can tell me exactly how to teach next year.”
These were my words to the principal before I took a job as a middle school seventh-grade teacher. They were bold words to my future boss, but they were words I absolutely believed in.
I was working at a middle school that was ranked at the bottom of six schools in the district for test scores in both math and English. I knew that the traditional system of a “one-size-fit-all” prescribed math curriculum was not working. Most teachers were doing nothing more than copying exactly what was in the book onto the board, or even worse, they used presentation slides that did it all for them. There was nothing autonomous nor creative in what they were doing.
My classes were different. It shocked most principals that at the beginning of each year, I had no detailed plan for the year. That’s because my curriculum was based on what my students’ needs were. I wanted to see within the first month where my students were on the continuum of mathematics. Is there a need for remediation? What is the spectrum of ability levels amongst my students? What are the predominant learning styles within each class? You simply cannot force Algebra onto students who do not have the foundations necessary to learn it.
After a month working at the middle school, I finally wrote the curriculum for the year.
With two classes, I had to go as far back as third-grade level math before moving forward. I discovered that most of my students were auditory or visual learners. In fact, most of them loved music so much, I wrote the entire curriculum centered around music.
With the third class, I only had to remediate a few concepts from sixth-grade math before I could start them on Algebra. The students in this class were predominantly logical and visual learners. With them, I wrote my curriculum centered around the visual arts with lots of challenging problems.
By the end of the year, 92% of my students were passing their standardized test. The focus was never on the test, but rather on teaching to my students’ learning styles and strengths.
At Academy of the Renaissance, we want our teachers to have the creative autonomy to design dynamic curriculum that centers around students’ strengths and interest with a focus on aligning to students’ learning styles.
Research after research have shown that workers who are given autonomy at their workplace are more productive and satisfied with their job. Employees are not seen as industrial era assembly-line workers, but rather professionals who are asked to demonstrate their skill, knowledge, and creativity through design and creation. This reiterates the importance of achieving the highest order of thinking on Bloom’s Taxonomy—creation.
What is more important is that a creatively thought-out curriculum improves not only the teaching environment and professional development for teachers, it also creates rich learning experiences for the students.
We must not overlook and disregard the benefits from the traditional model of education. Teaching to any extreme school of thought is dangerous.
The Renaissance Era did not disregard the past to create something brand new. It built on the works of past achievements and accomplishments by looking at life from a different angle and with more details, using both the scientific process and a creative lens.
