Image of the Child Part II

From Jan: Curious, Capable, and Social

Children are Naturally Curious.  When I spent time with my young grandchildren I found them to be curious about so many things—always a million questions and exploring in every direction.  Yet, I see as they are getting older their sense of curiosity seems to be waning and I wonder….  Where did it go?  How do we encourage that sense of wonder in them in school?

Children are Capable.  They can do so much more than we give them credit for.  In talking with Matt and Jason at the highs schools, they shared some of the many concerns the planning teams worried about while designing the College and Career Academies.

• If we sell coffee and drinks and let students purchase them throughout the day, will they get spilled and we’ll have messes everywhere?
• If we design a flex schedule that allows students to come and go based on their schedule, will there be chaos?
• Can we really trust our students to control their own time and schedules responsibly?

Hamilton Southeastern High School's College and Career Academy.
Build it, and they will come.  And they will rise to our expectations.

The College and Career Academies were structured with the belief that the students would respond appropriately—and they have.  Students will rise (and sink) to the level of what we expect. When you hear, “They’re not ready for that yet!” (whether the students are in pre-school or high school), this statement should sound an alarm.  

The key question:  Is it the students who aren’t ready—or is it us?

Fishers High School's CCA.  Children--and high
school students are children--are social!

Children are Social.  In fact, learning is social.  We grow and learn through the exchange of ideas.  Purposeful noise is a natural and integral part of learning.  How do we provide environments that allow for the exchange of ideas in natural ways, and how do we encourage the dispositions of learning through teamwork, collaboration and problem-solving?  If we believe that learning is a social activity, do our practices reflect our beliefs?

From Phil: When you've met one, you've met only one....

When I started my journey as a teacher in the fall of 1979, I was idealistic, more than a little naïve, a bit overconfident, optimistic about the profession, and hoping I could make a difference in the lives of my students.  As Lisa and I walked the few blocks from our first apartment to the tiny school on the outskirts of San Juan, Puerto Rico, I was incredibly nervous, but my goal was quite ambitious: to make the world a better place.

It looked different in 1979, but it's still there on the outskirts
of San Juan...

Some of you may not know that Lisa and I have a total of nine children and one grandchild.  Three of our children are “home grown,” and the other six were adopted from around the world.  I do not have space, and you likely do not have the inclination, to read a full description of each child.  Suffice it to say that our nine children are a diverse group and have taught us a lot.

A key learning for us occurred when one of our daughters was first identified as being on the autism spectrum.  An expert on autism told us, “When you’ve met one child on the spectrum, you’ve met one child on the spectrum.”  He had to repeat this line several times before I began to understand that he was indicating that we could look for common patterns, but our daughter’s abilities and needs would be different than other children on the spectrum.

 My experience as a teacher and as a father has been that his point about autism and the vast range of differences in children with autism could be applied to all children. 

From our wide variety of children, we have learned the importance of music and art, the need for special services support, how sports can add to academics, and how communication differs between the hearing and deaf worlds.  Each of our kids has different abilities and needs, and each one has had to find different paths, different connections, and different supports to successfully navigate school.  (And we still have a few to go….)

In over 20 years in the classroom and more than three decades after taking that walk to school in San Juan, I am a bit less nervous, but I don’t have much to change in the list I gave at the beginning paragraph.  Feel free to call me naïve and optimistic, but I still believe educators change the world. 

We do so one-by-one, meeting the needs of each student—each uniquely individual child—one at a time.

Have a great week HSE.  Our hope is that we all keep believing that children are strong, wonderful, curious, and capable, and that classrooms in HSE reflect this image of the child.

HSE Teaching and Learning Team