Dynamic Teachers Leaders of Change
Sharon F. Rallis and Gretchen B. Rossman with Janet M. Phlegar and Ann Abeille Corwin Press, Inc. Thousand Oaks, California 1995
From the Forward
As classroom teachers, we often feel we lack the power or position to change organizational structures, curriculum requirements, or educational legislation. But there is one place we can all begin to have a huge impact on improving education for our children in the 21st century. This change begins with our own image of what it means to be a teacher.
Dynamic Teachers From the Preface X
Most teachers are doing their best to meet the needs of their students, struggling with the realities of today’s classrooms and communities. Among them, however, a new type of teacher is emerging. These teachers are creating classroom communities that are truly focused on learning and building knowledge, rather than on merely transmitting information. The work of these teachers stands out because it reveals new roles they have adopted to meet the challenges they face. Through these new roles, they are beginning to achieve the goal of helping children think and learn, of preparing them for the unknown challenges that lie in their futures. We call these teachers “dynamic teachers.”
Few educators are exemplary in all these roles – but we maintain that the more teachers can develop expertise in each of the roles, the more effective they will be in educating children, given the realities they – and we – confront. A dynamic teacher is
- a moral steward;
- a constructor;
- a philosopher;
- a facilitator;
- an inquirer;
- a bridger; and
- a changemaker
Social Context Page 11
“The school does not exist in a void” (Cunningham, 1990, p.12). It is embedded in the social context of its surrounding communities. This social context has a tremendous effect on the classroom. Families with diverse structures, employment arrangements, and racial and ethnic backgrounds require new support systems. The school, as potentially the only stable institution in a community, plays a pivotal role in meeting this wider array of community needs. Schools can no longer close their doors to their surrounding communities.
Pg. 18
Dynamic teachers see individual children, not categories. Although they believe all children learn, they know that each child uses a different approach and brings a somewhat different perspective. All children do not look alike , nor do they all think alike. Dynamic teachers create a classroom where all children belong – the athletic girl, the gifted boy, the class clown, the recent immigrant, the child whose parents do not speak English, the quiet one, the middle-of-the-road student.
Dynamic teachers do no ask if a student can learn or how much of a prescribed set of standards a student has achieved, but under what conditions as student will learn and to what knowledge, skills, and opportunities the student has access. The practice of these teachers is focused on the construction and use of knowledge by the students themselves.
Human Rights for Children Pg. 27
Simply put, the values of dynamic teachers center around a strong belief in basic human rights of children and their families. Our understanding of human rights consists of the social, cultural, political, and civic rights identified and promoted by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted and proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. These articulated rights recognize knowledge about other people, foster attitudes of tolerance and respect, and promote awareness of individual responsibilities to treat all people with dignity. Human rights promote prosocial behavior, that is, “behavior that benefits other people.”
Pg. 31
Another dynamic teacher reveals her deep consciousness of her her values in the following excerpt from her professional portfolio: “The classroom should
- allow time and space for each child’s voice;
- immerse children in content, i.e. literature, real math problems, writing for real purposes;
- allow children to interact directly with the materials and concepts;
- focus on the children’s, not the teacher’s or curriculum’s, needs; and
- use what children bring with them from outside the school setting
Learning is Natural Pg. 44 – 45
Dynamic teachers recognize that learning is as natural as breathing. Believing that people are born learners, they know that all children in all classrooms are learning all the time. Often children’s learnings in school are not positive, empowering concepts. Many children learn that they cannot perform or that they are not valued or that language or math or spelling is boring. The dynamic teacher works with the child to build positive learnings. The dynamic teacher creates activities that capture the child’s natural curiosity and guide his or her natural learning. The goal is to enhance the child’s understanding of the surrounding world and his or her relationship to it.
Drawing from Piaget and Dewey, the dynamic teacher knows that “in order to know objects, the [child] must act upon them, and therefore, transform them: he must displace, correct, combine, take them apart, and reassemble them. From the most elementary sensorimotor actions . . . to the most sophisticated intellectual operations, . . . knowledge is constantly linked with actions or operations, that is, with transformations”. (Piaget, 1970) Maggie and Don (two dynamic teachers studied in this book) also recognize that learners make sense of new information and experiences by connecting them to what they already know. Although children can often make connections themselves, dynamic teachers take the role of helping this transfer from one context to another. Their classrooms offer children multiple opportunities to encounter new information and experiences, and their questions push students to make sense of new stimuli.
Teaching is a Becoming Pg. 55
Dynamic teachers follow not recipes or models; rather, they constantly attend to what they are doing with an eye on their goal and on inventing new ways to accomplish it. Through experience, they evolve their own knowledge of how to be a good teacher.
Teaching is always a becoming. To paraphrase Dewey’s definition of growth, teaching for the [dynamic] teacher is the constant reorganization, reconstruction, and transformation of one’s experience. It is developing one’s philosophy of teaching and of education as well. And, to paraphrase William James, one’s philosophy must make a definite difference in the way one lives his or her professional life. (Soltis,1994 p.253, emphasis added)
Pg. 56
If we understand a philosophy as a set of principles and assumptions that guides a person’s life, the dynamic teacher’s daily professional life expresses this complex mix of values and knowledge, action and thought – philosophy of professional commitment.
The elements of this philosophy are neither linear nor sequential; the form a seamless web of praxis (Freire, 1970) – the blending of theory and practice.
The Courage to be Excellent Pg. 57
As they journey toward increasing professional growth, dynamic teachers inquire and reflect, take initiative and act, and accept responsibility and are accountable for their own and their students’ learning. All these elements merge in the various roles dynamic teachers enact, described in the chapters to follow. Teachers move through this score over and over again, playing at one time the violin, at another the piano.
Most of all, this performance requires courage. These processes – these frames of mind – are by no means easy or undemanding; they go beyond what many of today’s teachers would accept as professional commitment. We believe, however, that many creative and ethical teachers have the courage and energy to willing to revisit their values and aspirations, and their practice.