Teachers: What would You Change to Produce Better Outcomes for your Students?

Posted on May 28, 2024 by admin

What are some of the outcomes you would like to change in the 2024-25 school year? Below is my list but please feel free to add, subtract, or create a list of your own. What do you want:

Academic success for all students rather than pushing some ahead before they are ready,
Better relationships with students (more opportunities to enjoy the kind of relationships you have had with your favorite students over the course of your career),
To deal with fewer behavioral issues in your classrooms and have more support from the office when you need it,
More discretion to adapt to the unique needs of students and to have more time to make such adjustments,
Better relationships with parents of your students,
Not to be blamed for disappointing outcomes of students,
To enjoy the pride of a job well-done, which comes from the success of your students.
To receive the respect and compensation teachers deserve for doing one of the most important and challenging jobs in all of society, and
To ensure your students have meaningful choices in life to provide for themselves and their families, contribute value to society, and fulfill the responsibilities of citizenship.

Few teachers can enjoy all such outcomes, routinely, and there is a reason for this. The way classrooms are structured, organized, staffed, tasked, resourced, and evaluated—which is what I refer to as the “education process”—is not designed to produce such outcomes. This existing education process is not equipped to deal with more than a few exceptions from the norm.

In many schools and classrooms there are more students who require more attention than any one teacher can handle without adversely impacting their ability to meet the needs of the rest of the class.

Ask yourselves whether any of the changes in policy, academic standards, methodologies, technologies, or reform initiatives over the past twenty years have resulted in a positive transformation of your classroom? The way teachers are asked to do their important work is a process no different, conceptually, than any other production or service-delivery process.

You know well that the “school choice” movement is not improving the outcome of students because moving teachers and students to a new building, changing the name above the door, and hiring less qualified teachers who are non-union does not help kids learn. Good teachers in an environment that allows them to adapt to the disparate needs of students is what enables students to learn.

It does not help at all when teachers are expected to try new things without adapting the education process to accommodate those changes. A juggler, for example, can successfully keep three balls moving; some can do four or maybe even five, but there is a limit to the number extra balls most jugglers can handle without dropping one.

As long as education policy makers remain loyal to the existing education process and expect teachers to teach an increasingly diverse population of students with ever greater disparity in academic preparation (which we define as lacking the prerequisite knowledge and skills), and emotional development (lack of maturity), millions of students will languish, and many thousands of teachers will feel the distress such a reality engenders.

And if that were not bad enough, teachers are expected to bear the burden of budget shortfalls? Unfavorable adjustments to teacher-to-student ratios often follow. If outcomes are disappointing no matter how hard people work or how qualified they are, the problem rests with the process.

Teachers reading this are asked to understand that all the complaints in the world, whether to administrators, or colleagues in the faculty break room or at union and association meetings, will not lead to a satisfactory solution. In any environment, if people want meaningful change, they must become advocates for new and specific, not generalized solutions.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying “we cannot solve a problem with the thinking that created it.” We must step outside the boundaries of conventional thinking.

Please examine the education model I have developed, not seeking reasons why it might not work but rather to imagine what it would be liked to teach in such an innovative environment.

This model is not offered to make teaching easier, because teaching is not easy, nor will it ever be. What this new model is designed to do is put teachers in a better position to be successful, so they can develop and practice their craft, and minimize the distractions that make teaching even more challenging than it needs to be.

While you are at my website, you are invited to explore further by reading my posts dated December 15, 2023, and January 23, 2024, respectively. The first is a 3,100-word essay summarizing the differences between the existing education process and my model. The second, is a 1,600-word summary of an experiment I conducted in a week-long sub assignment for a middle school math teacher that sparked the idea for my model.

If you want to learn more, click on the tab “Bio” at the top of this page and read why I feel qualified to develop and offer a new education model to you.

If you want to learn the full details of The Hawkins Model©, click on the tab at the top of the page that reads, “Education Reimagined, One Success at a Time – The Implementation plan.

Please consider helping me by sharing this post to spread the word about my model to your colleagues.

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If You Believe All Kids Can Learn, Open your Hearts and Minds to Change!

Posted on August 2, 2023 by admin

The Hawkins Model© is constructed on several variables that are essential to a quality education. The most essential is the quality of teacher and student relationships. My education model is constructed to facilitate the forging of such relationships and sustaining them for longer than a single school year.

Another essential variable is giving kids time to learn. Our education model changes time from a constant to a variable resource available to teachers and students in whatever quantity their success requires.

The third variable is that learning is the only thing that counts. To ensure a child learns we must get them off to a good start, which means taking the time to assess what children know when they arrive for their first day of kindergarten and what they have not yet learned. From what we learn from such assessments we will tailor an academic plan to each child’s unique needs. This determines the starting point for each student’s academic journey.

We choose to accept nothing less than a student’s best. This necessitates ending the practice of stopping a lesson; administering a test; recording whatever grade we assign based upon the number of mistakes each child makes; and then sending our students on to a next lesson, ready or not. For many kids, as a pattern of not being ready develops, it sentences them to a future in which they must deal with the challenges of life in a world they cannot fully understand.

My education model does not utilize tests to determine a grade but rather to confirm whether or not the student has mastered a given lesson or needs more help. We will modify the instruction process so that if the outcome of a test is unacceptable, we go back and reteach the lesson, giving the student the time, practice, help, and affirmation they need to learn from their mistakes. When we deem them ready, we administer a “do-over” exam and when a student achieves success we record that achievement and send the child onto the next lesson, not with a C, D, or F, but rather with an A or B and armed with the prerequisite knowledge and skills future lessons and life will require.

If the child still struggles their teachers’ job is unfinished. Consider that we do not stop teaching kids to ride a bicycle until they ride off down the street.

We interpret success as demonstrating proficiency. We celebrate each student’s academic success because it will help instill the powerful motivation that success can provide and with the development of healthy self-esteems.

We need to disregard the expectations in the academic standards that all students have two semesters to demonstrate readiness for first grade and, instead, establish the expectation that we have twelve semesters to prepare them for middle school. All students do not begin at the same starting line. What matters is that they get to the finish line. Once a student learns, how long it took them is no longer relevant.

As students gain confidence in their ability to learn, we anticipate an acceleration of their pace in learning. We need not worry they will fall hopelessly behind, which is the case with the existing process. Students fall behind only when the education process does not permit them to finish.

Once we document a student’s success it becomes part of their record until we make a point to verify their mastery on that lesson, which we will make part of the instruction process. Once verified, state testing becomes irrelevant and an unjustifiable use of time.

We accomplish all this by changing the classroom structure from one in which there is one teachers for 25 to 35 students, to a structure in which we have a team of three teachers for no more than 45 students.

Having a team of three teachers allows them to support one another, collaborate, and to manage a classroom with students progressing at different speeds. This also enhances the ability of teachers to forge relationships of the quality we seek.

The model keeps that classroom of teachers and 45 or fewer students together through the full primary phase of their education, which we define as what we formerly viewed as kindergarten through fifth grade. This eliminates the need to sever teacher/student relationships at the end of every school year and then require them to start over with a new teacher in the fall.

Nothing less than success is acceptable because a child’s success in learning is more important than any arbitrary schedule. We believe this process can substantially improve the probability that every child will experience success in pursuit of whatever goals they set for themselves. Helping a student develop a pattern of success changes everything and sets them on a path to agency.

With respect to implementation, if a school has three kindergarten classrooms, each with one teacher and 30 students, which requires a total of three teachers, we will need to add three additional teachers to staff two classrooms with teams of three teachers and forty-five or fewer students.

If we assume that the average teacher salary is $65,000, three teachers will require an investment of $195,000 to serve the needs of 90 students at a single grade level. This gives us a per student cost of $2,166. Consider Indiana, as an example. In 2025 they expect to spend over $6,300 per student on vouchers to enable 95,000 students to attend charter schools or faith-based schools. We believe the probability of student’s success, having learned in the innovative learning environment we are proposing to be significantly greater than sending students to charter schools that, currently, are not performing as well as the community public schools they were created to replace.

Our students, teachers and their communities are winners. The funds invested to add teachers goes right back into the local economy to improve our intellectual infrastructure. As they go about their lives, teachers contribute to the local, state and federal tax bases. Who knows where the money invested in vouchers will end up?

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