Education experts tell the teachers what they want to hear:
Educators can combat trends that threaten creative teaching, a Seattle preschool expert said Monday during an opening session of a regional education conference in Liberty. “We can stand really strong. We can plant our feet,” Ann Pelo told about 90 early education and primary school teachers attending the Connecting Learning Communities Conference at Pleasant Valley Baptist Church...Pelo urged audience members to “create a vision of resistance” against the assessment and standardized-test movement that is strong in education today, especially in the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Is it just me, or do phrases like “create a vision of resistance” seem astonishingly vague and meaningless?
Assessment goals are not necessarily incompatible with imaginative teaching, she said.
Well, that much makes sense, at least.
She told audience members about the time she let her students let their imaginations run wild after they discovered a smelly, cluttered spot underneath a heating grate in the school. The students decided it smelled because a skunk was in there. Pelo asked them to think about how it could have gotten in there. The children also wrote notes to the skunk asking it questions.This unplanned unit — which Pelo termed an “ordinary moment that held all these extraordinary possibilities” — allowed the students to use skills like writing and logic.
I know we're talking about elementary school kids here, but - writing notes to a skunk? Why not write notes to the principal asking him to get a maintenance man down there and figure out what's going on? And were these notes graded in any way? How 'bout a lesson on skunk biology? Heck, how 'bout a lesson in the local ecology, just to make sure skunks actually exist in their neck of the woods?
Attendees like Gay Gardner embraced Pelo’s message. “I like the idea of just following the children,” said Gardner, an infant and toddler teacher with Head Start in Kansas City. “It’s not about being wrong, it’s not about being right.”
Even for toddlers, I disagree.
Posted by kswygert at July 20, 2005 08:39 AM