Todd Beach recently tweeted a link to an interesting post of his from last year, “Kindergarten and Finnish Lessons”, in which he discusses Pasi Sahlberg’s Finnish Lessons in light of All I Ever Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Reading this reminded me of a key insight from past the few years. And, in the spirit of Robert Fulghum’s classic, it is quite simple: I accomplish more when I have help.
Lately, I’ve been getting that help from teacher candidates (aka student teachers). Todd’s whole post is well worth a read. His reflection on how Fulghum’s advice to “Share Everything” looks in Finnish education particularly struck a chord for me:
…[T]eachers and policy-makers in Finland have embraced a collaborative paradigm where they share information with each other about the learning needs of students and about teaching practices. Finnish teachers spend less time in the classroom than their American colleagues because more time is devoted to collaboration and professional development. “Lower teaching hours provide teachers more opportunities to engage in school improvement, curriculum planning, and personal professional development during their working hours” (Sahlberg, 2011:63)…
Working with quality teacher candidates each of the last three falls has allowed me to engage in the collaboration and professional development that Sahlberg lauds. Mentoring new teachers has its intrinsic rewards, too, but here I want to emphasize how it has improved my own practice. By the middle of the term quality student teachers can handle the primary load of instruction, although I remain heavily involved with unit and lesson planning. I function more like a Finnish teacher by using some of the time teacher candidate’s are running class to develop curriculum, both alone and with colleagues. I am heavily involved with curriculum and equity committees at both the building and district levels, and this is made possible in part by the extra grading and instructing labor that teacher candidates provide.
Collaborative teams in my department have also used student teachers to advance the history curriculum during these three years. Personally, significant break throughs that extra time has allowed over the past few years include: assisting a colleague in writing rubrics for honors and AP history writing, developing targets for the new district World History curriculum, and beefing up online practice quizzes in Moodle for AP European history students and refining the subsequent formal assessments. Two years ago an esteemed colleague working with me and our two excellent student teachers developed a history lab activity in which students uncover the different perspectives on the US-Dakota War of 1862, a major event in Minnesota history. This project is now a staple in the US History curriculum.
Beyond curriculum development I use teacher candidates to differentiate classes more frequently, because we can provide supervision and instruction for two groups simultaneously. For instance, the Global Studies collaborative team has developed a quality formative assessment on the basics of World Religions. Last fall while my student teacher led an enriching lesson on the Crusades with students proficient in the basic facts, I worked in a separate room with students who were not yet proficient. I further differentiated this group into students who had and had not completed the homework before the quiz. I was able to guide students who had completed the work but were not proficient in accessing the content through powerpoint presentations hosted online; and, once they were rolling I worked closely with the students who needed to complete the work. This is another example of how e-learning in school can facilitate differentiation. Retesting, on a different form of the assessment, the remedial group showed substantial improvement.
This all feeds Todd’s basic point about the importance of investing in human capital in education. Collaboratively designing curriculum is the highest order work that I do, and having more labor to deliver curriculum to students allows me to do more of it. Unfortunately, student teachers are not available for every veteran teacher, and they are not all as great as Ben, Bjorn, and Peter. A more systemic approach to investment in education would improve all kinds of results. But this, of course, costs money.
