Posted by:
Jane Hazen Dessecker
Posted on: May 21, 2001 at 3:35 PM
Message:
I have always been an advocate of teacher leaders and our project usd their expertise extensively.I think if teachers are given more time to work together, they could solve many of their problems and improve their teaching.During the year long actin research component of our model, teachers had great flexibility in asking their own questions and finding their own answers.I do agree there is an encouraging trend of integrated disciplines which is very positive, expecially from the teacher perspective. Sometime I fear we are asking too much of elementary teachers and maybe they could do a better job if they were not required to be experts as so much. Thankfully we were able to have a high science focus for 5 years..the next year the READING push started and it would have been a difficult conflict of time for most of the teachers. We do have state science tests. The good news is if we didn;t have state science tests, science would not be taught. That was the way it was before they started science tests in 1996. It does have detrimental side effects,though, such as the time spent focusing on test preparation. The test is over higher level thinking and includes 44% of the points on writing, so it has not conflicted with our interest in higher level thinking. Thanks for the comments.
|
