Let me first start by saying disciplinary literacy is a very good thing. I honestly think students will be better students if taught to read, write, and be able to comprehend different subjects. However; doing this is very time consuming. It takes a lot of planning and cooperation. This is something county office employees and administrators do not realize. Burdening teachers with standards, testing, data, pacing guides, and many other things that just do not come to mind right now is not going to help better students’ knowledge. The government does not care about the education of young people, they want results! As long as it looks as if children are learning progressively, schools are rewarded by getting money and being left alone. As soon as a school does not show improvement on testing, the government bombards the school with “teacher workshops” in order to teach the teacher how to get students to do better on test. With this being said, since disciplinary literacy needs to be done, teachers need more slack! They are NOT magicians!!! They cannot wave their magic wands to make students understand how to read and write. If teachers on all subjects have to bear the burden of literacy instruction, they will need to be given the kinds of professional development that will enable them to succeed. Not just the “teacher workshops” that are held maybe twice during a teacher workday, but an actual content session that will teach the teachers how to do their job better. Normally, teachers have to sit in sessions discussing how to use tons of pacing guides, standards, and so forth. These things do not help teachers!! Pacing guides are not on the pace of students!! Administrators and county personnel have to be sensitive to teachers concerning pacing guides. County personnel need to know that teaching things on pace will be impossible, and that teachers can only teach on the pace of their students.
I am for disciplinary literacy; however, PLEASE I BEG OF YOU, DO NOT GIVE TEACHERS MORE WORK TO DO WITH THE SAME SPEEDY DEADLINES!!! GIVE TEACHERS A BREAK!!!
We are always told what we are doing wrong. Our children are falling behind; you need to teach the standards, the children are below grade level in reading and math etc. I understand that we have work to do. It is easy for someone to say that we have to improve the academic levels of our children and send us to workshops, but have you ever received any useful information from said workshops? No one has ever given us any useful strategies on making improvements to our student’s level of understanding. Obviously what we are doing is not working. Will educational policies change anytime soon? I have no idea.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I can't even have a conversation with my students. I wish I could use my planning time to differentiate and meaningfully assess students, instead I'm at some type of training on a daily basis. By Friday, I barely know my own name. I simply can't keep up. I would love the opportunity to sit down with my students and provide them with support and tutoring, but instead I'm dashing off to the next meeting. When are we going to get the chance to use all of this training? Assuming of course that we learned anything useful at all to begin with. I would love to be able to create more meaningful assessments and help my struggling students, instead I'm pushed to finish more and more paperwork including a huge document that tracks student progress, grades and test scores over the entire year. I would love help a student learn to love reading, and I try to instill that by talking to some of my students about the books I loved at their age. Of course, I have sixth graders so its a little easier for me.
ReplyDeleteIt boggles the mind to think that if a student can not read or is turned off by reading that the way to improve it is to take up all the teachers free time in training the teacher to do something that the school system thinks is important. If the school system would support the teachers and let them do what they are good at, I think you would see improvements in students reading skills and a deeper communication between the student and teacher.
ReplyDeleteWhen managers of any type of business do not know how to fix a problem they push busy paperwork to make it look like they are doing something. In reality they are just using up ever ones precious time.