Bread
3 min read
One of my favorite places here in Portland is Tabor Bread. It's a bakery and cafe; they source all their materials locally, and bake their bread in a large wood fired oven that they designed themselves.
When the bakers make bread, they follow the entire process: they mill their own flour, mix the ingredients, knead the dough, shape the bread, set it up to proof overnight, set and light their own fire, and then, the next morning, they bake their bread. But they stay with their bread throughout their entire process. They make notes on how the structure of their fire affects cooking temperatures and the evenness of heat distribution; they observe how minor changes in ingredients, or in relative quantities, affects the bread.
Not surprisingly, the bread is amazing.
Because I spend a good portion of my days thinking about learning, I immediately begin to wonder what would happen if we applied similar care and attention to the resources we use in schools. Right now, we outsource both curriculum and assessment, two elements that loom unnecessarily large over the process we currently call learning. As states begin to implement the Common Core, we are arguably seeing the beginning of outsourcing the daily classroom planning, as teachers are given highly scripted scenarios to follow. In the era of high stakes testing, when schools that don't get sufficiently high scores on standardized tests are closed, with their principals and staff fired, using outsourced and scripted solutions makes one kind of sense: it's safe.
But what if professional development involved more than pointing teachers at resources they could follow? What if professional development could be a deep dive into process, where teachers had the opportunity to work with each other, to work collectively to evaluate their specific needs, and then create the means to address those needs. How often does a teacher get the time and support to fully articulate the needs of their specific classroom, and devise ways to address those needs?
Professional development could be about empowering teachers to define and meet needs, in an environment where teachers had the ability to follow their lesson from conceptualization through to assessment. I'm not saying that every teacher needs to be a curriculum author and an assessment expert, but right now, there isn't even a nominal effort to get teachers more involved in the process. An increased use of open educational resources would be one way to support locally relevant work. Reworking the way we think of and deliver professional development could potentially be the starting point for real and permanent improvement of our educational system.
