What are teachers to do in an educational system bought by big business and managed by non-educators? Connect!

Teachers are discussing how to infuse authentic, joyful, inspiring learning into a test-focused system. They are talking, blogging, sharing, and trying to show what is truly important for learning, for students, for our country. Who is listening?

Teachers are looking at our students, their interests, their needs, their drives to guide them to be connected, focused, collaborative, involved learners.

Teachers ask tough questions, and collaborate in places like #clmooc to find answers, together, for their students.

Teachers know that each year is different; we must grow them, our teaching, our learning, our students into what might be.

Teachers know the spiral effect — and the nodes of learning interconnected; it’s just not the linear test craze we are asked to do.

Teachers know their curriculum and their students; they tie them together in a learning continuum that builds life-long learners through an interconnected web of content driven by that necessary kernel for learning: curiosity.

Teachers orchestrate the learning of those in their care, a community of learners with unlimited possibilities. Why do we limit them with pacing, rigid objectives, and tests? Teachers studied to be facilitators of personal learners. Let them teach.

Teachers are lifelong learners: because they reflect on their own learning, they know that learners “don’t always realize they are on a learning pathway;” we inspire, draw out, and lead.  Educate does mean in Latin, “to draw out; to lead.”

Teachers understand that too much structure limits learning; students must DO and ACT for deep learning to occur.

Teachers know that each learner is always on the verge of learning (that zone of proximal development), that it may be what we are learning, or it may be what the student needs to move forward. It is what is “what we find ourselves next to in our learning.” Under the current stress of managing requirements to pass tests, we often lose the needed “next to” learning.

Teachers make room for emergent possibles.

Fear is crippling teacher innovation.

Fear is defeating.  What can we do?

Teachers are connecting for support, inspiration, and collaboration. How about you? What can you do to inspire a return to education — to lead to draw out?

Teachers are supported by various organizations who understand true learning.

Join places like #clmooc Connected Learning; Look around here for inspiration.

Learn more.

Join.

Learn more about engaging curriculum.

Listen to people like Grant Lichtman, Sir Ken Robinson, Will Richardson, Chris Lehman, and many more….and remember the one who started this thoughtful discussion on the true meaning of learning and education: John Dewey.

Share your stories. Blog. Get connected, and join those who are bringing authentic and joyful learning back into the classroom for all kids.

Be like David Lee Finkle: “We have a choice in this country. Keep listening to the story told by the “reformers” and end up with test-score mills even worse than the ones we have now, or listen to teachers who want a public education system that isn’t an industrial factory spitting out test takers but that offers schools that are places for deep thinking, learning, creativity, play, wonder, engagement, hard work, and intense fun.’