"There are no standard remedies, or go-to fixes this time around. That is why we are going to need your help. We'll need young people like you to step up. We need your daring and your enthusiasm and your energy." I will continue to offer my enthusiasm and my energy -- and hopefully I will be daring enough to learn new skills and strategies for the betterment of my students and my community.
Critical Incidents in Education
Introduction:
Before I share specific school experiences I have had, I want to express my own perspective on teaching and education. I have always been very impressed by the thinking of John Dewey, who is considered the "Father of Public Education" in America, and also I've been influenced by the more contemporary strategies put forward by Albert Bandera, who is well-known for his theory on "self-efficacy" (positive goal-setting), that helps students and teachers in the classroom setting. But as to Dewey, a trailblazer who had the vision to express the important values on public education that he believed strongly in -- even if what he said and wrote went against the popular opinion, which it sometimes did -- he is an icon whom I admire. Dewey is to the institution of public education what Thomas Jefferson is to the Bill of Rights.
Dewey believed in teaching kids how to think and how to be problem solvers. I believe in a very profound way each teacher should also be a trailblazer with the students in his or her classroom. That is, many if not most of the students have had teachers who were indifferent to or ignorant about those students' cultures, uninterested in the child's parents' socioeconomic status, or to the child's need for one-on-one attention. And so by reaching students who hitherto were alienated from teachers, an alert, sensitive teacher is blazing trails.
John Dewey believed that education goes well beyond what it can do for the individual. Education, in Dewey's opinion, "…is the fundamental method of social progress and reform," (Dewey, 2002). One thing that John Dewey believed in which makes a tremendous amount of good sense to me is that schools should work hard to produce "thinking citizens" rather than "obedient workers." As a teaching assistant, that is what I have tried to do in all situations -- help students learn to think out issues and solve problems.
John Dewey was patient with many things in society, but he did not show a lot of patience for waste in education. In Chapter III of his book The School and Society, (Introductions by Spencer J. Maxcy) he directs his attention to "Waste in Education." He's not talking about the waste "of money" or "waste of things" -- but rather, he is writing about the waste of a "human life." He believes (Dewey, p. 78) that the school systems are "isolated" and that "all waste is due to isolation."
My Own Experiences:
I took Dewey's philosophy to heart and put it to use in the classroom where for 4 years I was an assistant with 10-15 special education students. Every day the teacher had projects for each of these students, specifically designed for each individual student. I was appraised of what the special education assignments were for each of these children, and I did my very best to carry out the assignment of helping them help themselves, Dewey-style.
No time was ever wasted in our class; never did the teacher assume these students were just biding their time nor did she ask me to just "manage" their behaviors to get them through the day. Every day was a new day, anything that has gone sour the day before had been forgotten or forgiven, and we had fresh flowers in the classroom as well as interesting interactive technologies as well as colorful, real-world art and posters on the walls.
The parents of children with learning disabilities, who have been in special education programs (there are approximately five million such children with varying disabilities currently in public and private schools in the U.S.), have deep concerns of course as to the quality of instruction their children are receiving. Through my training I have learned that by staying in close touch with parents -- especially the parents of minority children and children with special needs -- I can have a greater positive influence on that particular child. There was one boy I helped by relating well to his parents; he was an African-American with learning disabilities who was also given to behavioral problems, and who actually could have been mainstreamed into regular classes except...
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