field journal: impersonal v/s personal education
PSCS Staff Meeting | 04/23/2008 | 4:00 – 6:00 pm | Attendees: Director, Administrative Director, 2 Teaching Staff members, myself
This was the first PSCS staff meeting I attended after starting the ADP at Prescott College. I have been attending the PSCS staff meeting for close to 4 years now; as a staff member for the first 3 years and as a staff consultant this academic year. So, when it came time to identify field experiences for the Foundations of Education course, it seemed most natural to weave my attendance and learnings from the staff meeting into the broad education issues course that the Foundations course is meant to be.
After the meeting, I returned to the course description for the Foundations course to determine how my learnings from the meeting mapped to the learning targets of the course. I did a first read of the course description and then another and then yet another. I couldn’t find an exact match. I was disappointed at first. My learnings from the staff meeting are often profound. I believe there has to be a place for such learnings in any serious teacher preparation program. It was then that I paused and realized something deeper.
Most teacher training programs, or for that matter, most administrative aspects of education, policy making and so on treat the entire enterprise of education in an impersonal manner whereas real education at its very core is highly personal. What do I mean?
To educate a child, we need to understand the child, her temperament, her desires, her wishes, her fears, her abilities, her social context, her family, her changing nature. By understanding the child we can begin to address education to her in a meaningful manner. Knowing her enables us to create an environment in which her unique set of genes, thoughts, upbringing, biases, strengths, weaknesses, abilities and passions can flourish. By knowing her, we can touch her and create the space in which she might be transformed.
Without knowing her, we create a generic environment that while it might be meaningful to her cannot nurture her wholly. How can it? A generic environment suffers from the law of averages — it averagely meets the needs of a majority of children. But, very few children fit into the average touchpad not working category and even those that seem to, each have so many unique characteristics that we must ignore in creating a generic environment.
Our education approaches tend to all be geared towards creating a generic environment. In doing so, we hope to sort of meet the needs of some children, while never really deeply transforming any child. We do an average job. Is average good enough? Or just as Tim Collins says in his book Good to Great, “good is the enemy of great”; is an average environment the enemy that keeps us from reaching each individual child?
PSCS makes a sincere attempt at meeting each child where she/he is at, honoring the child’s uniqueness in every way possible. PSCS staff meeting agendas focus on individual student needs at least half of the time if not longer. Sometimes, a single child is discussed for half the meeting. Needless to say the children are well-understood by the staff. This week we focused on a piracy issue raised by one student, the temperament of another in the context of a family trip and how that is affecting his learning, the challenges made to two other students to take on greater responsibility for themselves and the plans of a junior to travel abroad to broaden his educational experience.
It is no wonder then that when I came home and tried to match these very personalised discussions against the broad strokes, generic learning targets of my course, I couldn’t find a match. Don’t get me wrong, my course has good learning targets and my understanding of the generic landscape is critical. I raise this point simply to point out the state of affairs as perceived by me – that we tend to address the generic in our learning environments and so we might be missing out on addressing what is fundamentally a very personal experience.