Maverick Teachers: Fiction or Fact?
June 05, 2009
It's not easy being a maverick. Hollywood teaches this again and again"young, idealistic teachers break the mold, tear up the textbooks and try something new"only to be hounded by principals and angry parents until they are sent packing, to the tears and outcries of their newly awakened students.
"I hate those movies," says Jessica Goring, assistant principal at The Bronx School of Law and Finance, and a former history teacher.
"It makes it seem as though most teachers aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing." In her school, Goring says, exceptional teachers are the rule.
As a principal, rather than trying to force her teachers to conform to a mold, she sees her role as creating an environment that allows all teachers to try new and different things. "I'd always rather someone try something new," she says, "even if it doesn't work."
Recently Goring observed a history class where the teacher posted historical documents around the room, and created a scavenger hunt. Students were given statements and had to find which document proved it. "It was so cool," Goring says, "I wish I had done it."
"A lot of teachers at Bronx School of Law share their ideas and work with each other," she continues, "as soon as someone does something kind of cool, that gets out to other teachers," and they try something similar in their classrooms.
Kelly Wickham, with a decade of experience as an English teacher, and who also writes a popular blog about parenting (mochamomma.com) says when she was first starting out, "trying to completely get away from the lecture format and letting the students have the floor," she was terrified. "I was afraid it would be totally chaotic."
But Wickham says she was given good advice by veteran teachers who told her it was okay to let go of some authority in the classroom. "Students have to do the learning, have to do the lesson," she says. "I never thought that would work and it absolutely does."
Now an assistant principal at Lanphier High School in Springfield, Ill., Wickham says she sees lots of maverick teachers. "It's the impassioned ones who realize they're not teaching a subject, they're teaching human beings that become the mavericks."
She says being able to relate to students is more important than knowing the subject. For instance, "there are people who can do math and are a wonder with numbers and can figure things out. But that has no bearing on whether you can transfer that knowledge to students."
Like Goring, she encourages her teachers to try new ideas all the time"and to evaluate constantly whether it's working. "You have to look at the data that you get from it, see how well it worked for the majority of the students," Wickham says, "and then you have to tweak it from there."
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COMMENTS
If the teachers are always experimenting, does that make students the lab rats? Are there some fundamentals of teaching that should never be toyed with?
Leave your response in the comments below.
