Today’s post will focus on the lack of critical thinking and funding. Yep. We’re gonna talk about money!
Click the links to read the previous posts:
Lack of Critical Thinking
Now, many of you will balk at this as a problem, probably because you’ve been told that Critical Thinking is an important part of the curriculum and that it’s important for students to master it. If you’re a teacher, you’ve been to countless hours of training, telling you how important it is to incorporate Critical Thinking, to incorporate the highest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy in your lessons. And if you look at the way standards are written, you probably see some of the verbs from higher up on the Taxonomy that would seem to indicate that students are expected to think critically. I, too, have been to professional development about extending students’ thinking but I have found that while it seems to be important on paper, it doesn’t seem to be important in practice.
Teachers go to a lot of professional development about Bloom’s Taxonomy. We are taught how to write the right verbs in our lesson plans and create lessons and activities that push kids up the Taxonomy. It looks really good on paper that principals turn in to their bosses. But the reality is that we are still required to administer standardized tests that don’t always ask questions the way we’ve been told to teach them. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, our jobs are tied to the scores students earn on these tests and when push comes to shove, we need to teach in a way that will help them pass these tests.
The loss of play in the youngest years is also a contributing factor in this loss of critical thinking. Students are not learning how to solve problems through play and social interaction and they grow up dependent upon adults to solve their problems for them. They didn’t learn to make mistakes in the safe environs of the housekeeping area and they are afraid of making them in the high stakes elementary classrooms.
What can we do about it? We have to allow our students time to play, time to explore, time to have free time to think through problems and come up with ways to solve them. We have to change how we assess student learning. If we want teachers to be allowed to give students the opportunity to think critically, we have to take the pressure off of them to make sure the students perform on standardized tests.
Poorly Allocated Funding
Budget season is always stressful in a school. Waiting to find out if your principal has enough money to keep you on staff, wondering if you’re going to get the crayons and pencils you were hoping to replenish next year, wondering if you’ll get a cost of living raise to cover the additional cost of the new health insurance rates. Every year, schools are being asked to do more with less. People want technology to be integrated into the schools but don’t want to spend the money to buy the technology. People want modern, clean facilities but don’t want to spend the money to keep those buildings up. People want quality teachers but don’t want to spend the money to pay them a salary they can live off of without supplementing. Every year, schools are asked to spin gold out of straw. But there is no magic little man to come in and spin that straw into gold (trust me, if he did exist, he’d be on the payroll). Most of the time, teachers are asked to supplement what school systems can’t. Teachers are already paid less than many professionals and then are asked to spend our own money to buy what is not supplied.
What can we do about it? We have to agree, as a society, that our schools are worth more than what we are currently giving them. This might mean making some hard choices. This means that funding decisions need to be made from the littlest kindergartner on up. Priority should be given to staff and resources that directly impact students which means possibly looking at streamlining administrative positions, a task that could be accomplished easily with less paperwork. It means federal, state, and local governments need to look at how they allocate funds. It means we have to advocate for our students. It means we need to allow schools to find alternative funding options. We cannot continue to expect to get gold from straw.
Tomorrow I’ll address decision-makers and federal dollars (yep! We’re going to talk about money again!).