To grow, teachers must be able to critically reflect on their own performance.
Education is “triggered” by teachers.
It therefore makes sense that education should also be able to critically reflect on its own performance.
Currently, this is happening through the reassuring precision of analysis and numbers. The language of mathematics, data, and statistics provides a universal language that (ideally) resists rhetoric and insists on facts. It also provides a basis for research and natural reference points for the kinds of strategies we use to improve our schools.
To be wholehowever, this critical reflection – this self-criticism – must be qualitative and quantitative. That means we only have half the picture right now.
An educational system with self-awareness
Criticism is a harsh sounding word, but it’s close enough to the word critical to see that they belong together. To think critically is to bring about some kind of “criticism,” but keep in mind that criticism can happen without critical thinking. Education seems to be causing problems here.
See also Education needs more than reform
Self-awareness is the precursor to self-knowledge; self-knowledge is a precursor to context; context is a precursor to understanding.
Applied to education as a whole – as a system – self-awareness seems awkward. It is a uniquely human trait that depends in part on the ability to isolate one’s own self, and it falls apart when one person becomes two.
To be self-aware, it is necessary to be able to see around “yourself” without missing anything. That you see all the parts from start to finish and at a scale that doesn’t hide their function. Otherwise, you are not aware of yourself, but aware of the fragments. Piece aware.
For a school system, comprehensive awareness would mean every school, cafeteria, classroom, sports field, grade, textbook, IT policy, grading policy, bus route, parent concern, committee, federal guidelines, and budget line. Each course, course title, bell schedule, class change process and school mascot.
And the students, too—their history, their interests, their reading levels, their affections, curiosities, habits, sense of self-efficacy, and their own patterns of living in local communities. Every book they loved and every book they hated—every bad habit, source of academic apathy, and cause of intrinsic motivation and source of intrinsic motivation.
And teachers. And higher ed. And technology – and each of them can be scattered into ten thousand pieces.
So many moving parts obscure the whole, and the whole obscures the parts—meaning that self-awareness and self-criticism remain beyond our reach. The best we can muster is research.
Clearly, a self-aware education system is impossible as currently designed—which means that a self-correcting education system is also impossible as currently designed.
Sedimentation
Instead, awareness of education—and educators within education—tends to come in a series of flashes and corrections in a series of blips. The broad vision that leads to continuity day by day, semester by semester and year by year has been replaced by artificial streaks of excitement, enthusiasm and trend. Glimpses and quips do not lead to the transformation that our funding, technology, and collective experience and passion would otherwise be capable of.
Scale will be a challenge for creating a self-aware education system that is capable of repeating and transforming itself through built-in mechanisms that actually work.
Let’s create something huge that nurtures the intellectual and creative growth of millions upon millions of tiny human beings, and then be surprised when the results are mediocre and the students are anonymous.
For education to be self-aware, it will have to see itself and all its own mechanisms. If we insist on a national system that is monitored at the state and district level, it will depend on national, state and district efficiency and effectiveness. We have created a system of teaching and learning—for human improvement—that is unmanageable by that very design. A system that incredibly wants to globalize.
Whether it’s a challenge of size, scale, hubris or design, “full” self-criticism is not possible. While this is true, there is nothing but minor bursts of occasional improvement.
For now, in your classroom, school, or district, imagine what self-criticism and self-correction look like right now. It’s likely a combination of data teams, lesson planning feedback, and more data.
What are you doing to get a full picture of who you are, how you’re doing, and the kinds of adjustments your craft as an educator requires? If we can’t come up with a good answer for this, we shouldn’t be surprised when other people (deliberately vague) step in and do it for us, stop believing in what we’re doing, or design and fund alternatives that have thinking and own design.
An unsatisfactory teacher is eventually replaced. Underserved schools, districts—and most critically, instructional models—are perpetually underfunded and untouchable.
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