Stephen Hurley has been involved in public education for nearly 30 years, and is passionately committed to the idea of effective, powerful learning experiences for all participants. A musician, technology-watcher, father and husband, Hurley finds life in the world of education extremely rewarding, even when the conversations get a little contentious. While Stephen acknowledges the successes of our Canadian education system, he believes that our current way of "doing school" is in need of some bold new ideas--ideas that will breathe more fire into the learning lives of students and teachers alike. You can contact Hurley by email at stephen.hurley@sympatico.ca or visit http://voicEd.ca, a new collaborative writing space for those interested in more conversations about education in Canada.
Teaching the Way We Aspire to Teach
We live in a period where a scientific perspective on school reform has come to dominate the education discourse in this country. You know the drill: find the best research-based knowledge about teaching and learning and work to move it into the practice of each and every teacher. After all, if it works, it works!
It's this perspective that has grounded and inspired much of the work with which most school districts across Canada have busied themselves over the past decade or more. It's not necessarily wrong; in fact, its a very hopeful step to developing a more enhanced sense of professionalism. But, as a perspective, it's incomplete. I fear that, in an effort to get to what is knowable, usable, and replicable about teaching and learning, we've pushed to the side the fact that schools exist in a highly nuanced and richly woven context where goals, interests and measures of quality collide on a daily basis. Some of these conflicts are very recognizable, but others are hidden deep in the DNA of this place we call school.
There is a sense in which Teaching the Way We Aspire to Teach: Now and In the Future is an attempt to explore more deeply what has been sidelined by our love affair with the rational. The stories of excellence and hope that we heard as we moved across the country did not, in any way, discount the importance of trying to discover what could be known and shared about teaching and learning. What we did discover, however, was a strong understanding among Canadian educators that their professional lives were more than a collection of replicable bits and pieces that could be amalgamated into something called teaching.
Most teachers will tell you that the approaches and strategies that have worked with one group of students may not have worked as well with another group. Heck, I have even found that things that have been pure magic in September have fallen flat with the same group in November.
And that's precisely the point! Effective teaching practice is not something that can be extracted from one context, packaged and easily inserted into another. Unless we're willing to acknowledge that the context is just as important as the strategy, we're missing a incredibly powerful opportunity.
It is my hope that Teaching the Way We Aspire to Teach will open up a whole new set of conversations across the country. In shifting some of the focus away from effective practice as a finished product, I hope that we can shine light on the conditions that support and contribute to good teaching and learning.
But it's challenging work. On the one hand, it's not always easy to get a handle on context. I believe that the commitment we made to begin with personal stories of excellence set us on the right track, but we may need other tools to help us better understand those stories.
On the other hand, this work may not sit well with those who are equally committed to viewing education as a type of rational system that is primarily known and explained through a set of scientific tools and methods.
To say that there is middle ground is not a negative thing. It is an acknowledgement of the fact that, while we will never get it totally right, a multi-facted perspective is the best way to come closer to the teachers we aspire to be, and the system that we aspire to have.
