Adam Burk, Maine Enterprise Schools' volunteer Networking Director, was recently interviewed by EdReformer, from which our recent post on Rocketship Schools came. He blogs at Pushing Upward and CoöperativeCatalyst, and is an example of the kind of teacher we think can transform educational experiences for many young people - IF we are able to create the kinds of schools that not only draw extraordinarily committed folks like Adam in, but create the kinds of working conditions that keep them.
Much is made of the fact that study after study shows that the factor most associated with student learning is the "quality" of the teacher. What such research does not factor in is the degree to which many of the highest quality teachers leave within 1-5 years of beginning their career - not because they are not good at it, but because they are VERY good at it - and feel they can no longer compromise between what they know can do and what they are allowed to do.
Adam, like many of our prospective teachers, has a multi-disciplinary background - he's worked an environmental educator, as a youth outreach worker at a homeless shelter, and currently works to bring healthy food to Maine's public schools. Like many of us, his brain does not necessarily work by breaking integrated concepts down into disintegrated disciplines like science and math, or English and art. So any job that would force him to de-link what he knows are linked concepts is unlikely to work for him. Not only that, but he also knows that our individual wellness and wholeness, as well as the health of any community we are part of, is a crucial factor in our ability to work and accomplish goals.
Among the replicable structures that each Maine Enterprise Schools will build (and INSIST that our teachers and students get good at sustaining) are those that are often thought of as relating to character, rather than academic content. The term I prefer, though clunky, is "Habits of Work and Learning," adapted from Deb Meier's Habits of Mind. What we call it does not matter as much as that we get EVERY bit as good at seeing ourselves as teachers of how to be good people as we do of how to be good chemists, for example. This is not as easy, nor does it lend itself well to standing in front of a room of 30 kids and telling them what it means to be good.
Such learning is ALWAYS experiential, and always varies by student...what does it mean to say something that you thought was funny, but that the kid next to you thought was mean? How do you learn to accept feedback, rather than make excuses? What does it look like to make one more attempt to do something that you've always "failed" at - especially if every time you've failed, you've had someone telling you directly, or implying, that there's something wrong with you? What does it mean to persevere? To adapt? To be honest with yourself and others? Adam not only knows the value of these questions; he wants to devote at least part of his teaching career to helping kids become resilient and self-reliant; compassionate and collaborative.
Right now, though, the jobs that enables Adam to define his work that way are largely NOT in public schools. They're in private schools, ranging from character-based schools like Hyde School to semester programs like Chewonki Foundation's Maine Coast Semester, and therefore largely available only to kids of means. Or they're in at-risk, after-school, or add-on programs like the Real School, Kamp Ketcha, or Kieve - where you either have to prove that you have not developed many of those character skills to qualify, or you get them one week out 13 years of formal schooling.
Essentially, we've created a largely separate pool of jobs that value the teaching of the things we know matter most - not how much math one knows, but what one does with the math one knows. We've also separated those jobs, for the most part, from the work of our public schools, so that they serve only those people who can afford it - or more troubling, as a usually too little, too late intervention for those who could have benefited from some explicit work on "character" (back when they were sent to the special ed room because they scored too low on the second grade standardized test.) As usual, we have all kinds of examples of successful models that do this and that can be integrated from pre-school on: responsive classroom, restorative justice, peer mediation, civil rights teams, etc. But also as usual, we put the vast majority of our resources into an efficiency-based system that measure what the kids do today, not what they are likely to do, or not do, (and cost or not cost) ten or twenty years down the road.
To be clear, this is not "instead of." The best public schools - those that see "character" as the lens through with students develop a deep understanding of intellectual and academic concepts - do not choose one or the other. They also ensure that if the Adam Burks of the world who want to teach in such schools are not forced to choose, either.
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