I believe that all students can learn and everyone must be given the opportunity to do so. Students need a safe, secure, and comfortable place in which to learn. Schools must provide a well-trained staff and each teacher must be provided, a well-organized curriculum involving all possible learning styles. As an administrator, my purpose is no longer to impact the students directly, but to give opportunity and feedback allowing teachers to give quality education. It is a teacher’s responsibility to guide and facilitate learning. School leadership’s responsibility is to develop the teacher and ensure that their tools are up to date, relevant and operational for the students that will be walking in their classrooms.
I believe that teaching students to be responsible citizens and fostering intrinsic motivation is one of many goals for educators today. Additionally, students have technology at their figure tips. What they need to know is what to do with the abundance of information available to them. Students and teachers need to be able to learn and explore together. Teachers have further experience with knowledge in particular subjects; therefore, what they have to say is useful and can add to a student’s educational experience. However, what teachers learn over the course of their educational experience is different than the needs of students that are currently learning today. Information expands immensely over time and students need to have the ability to expand with the knowledge.
Learning is a community effort and the inquiry process is one way for a teacher to build character, confidence and openness to new ideas. Through collaboration, discourse and evaluation, an atmosphere of trust, communication and passion for learning can be achieved. Inquiry investigation is fundamental in all learning and specific content areas. Teachers must address developmental and instructional areas in order to compare, question, create and interpret data. As teachers work with students to integrate skills, decode knowledge and integrate concepts, they much encourage the analysis of information. The exchange of ideas allows knowledge to grow and today information is doubling every two years. Students need to be a part of that growth process, not only to be able to learn concepts, but also to continually expand on what is presented to them through their creativity and exploration. Students need to be taught to continually ask questions and not to just settle with what is taught to them.
As an administrator in a school, I constantly see not only students learning, but teachers teaching and what we need to do today is prepare students for that creative process. Education needs to inform on the fundamentals and also teach tools to expand on the current knowledge through all the resources that are available to them. Students need not graduate with skills that are no longer useful in the work force and the work force has significantly changed. Companies are operating with philosophies that allow employees significant independence. Google’s five principals allow those that work there to work on things that matter, affect everyone in the world, solve problems with algorithms if possible, hire bright people and give lots of freedom, and don’t be afraid to try new things. We, as educators, need to prepare students that will work in these types of environments with the skills necessary do such things.
