Whats the hardest thing about trying to shift to standards-based teaching and learning?
If I put on my teacher hat for a moment, it’s overwhelming to be given all these standards and told you’re teaching to them, and that you have to really rethink the whole way you approach your school year, and really, your whole job. I read somewhere that the problem with education reform is that when something new comes along and we tell teachers “this is good,” the inherent message seems to be that what they were doing before was bad. So when something new comes along, some teachers get in a defensive mode, saying something like, “you mean to tell me I’ve been teaching wrong all these years?” The message we want to get out is that we can try to do our work better without rejecting what we’ve done before. It just means that we’ve learned some new ways of doing things that can help more of our kids get closer to where they need to be. We’re asking teachers to re-examine all of their favorite activities and ask tough questions about them. Is drawing the Egyptian gods and goddesses on a
