Statement of Purpose

Teachers – like doctors, social workers, and other professionals – must continually advance our understanding of education in order to use the most effective methods in our personal practice. This is why licensing agencies require teachers to participate in professional development, take classes, and earn clock hours in order to renew our teaching certificates.

The students we teach will have jobs that haven’t even been invented yet. We cannot even picture where our students are headed. We cannot teach them the exact skills they will need to flourish in the future.

The future needs expert learners. Expert learners will be able to adapt to changing job markets, understand which of their personal qualities help or hinder success, and thrive on trying new things. They will have what it takes to succeed in a world that cannot be imagined today.

So, what should we teach? Fortunately, teachers do not have to make this important decision. Schools and districts, state and federal governments and many educational organizations strive to create thoughtful grade level and content area academic standards. Teachers are given a curriculum to follow and (hopefully) materials to support that curriculum. The teacher’s job is to enact the written curriculum in their classroom with their specific students.

Generally, teachers do not decide what to teach – we decide how to teach. Deciding how to teach is an exciting, complex, and demanding mission. Many educators believe that how we teach is as important as what is being taught. In any case, designing academic structures, planning engaging lessons, assessing and supporting the students given into our care, is the essence of our expertise. Breathing life into precisely stated learning goals, fostering a sense of wonder for the natural world, celebrating the process of benefiting from mistakes and the excitement of finally getting it right – these are snippets of what we create when teaching.

The world of education is fast paced; filled with new ideas and new research findings every time you open your planning book. Culture changes, families are constantly being redefined, technology leaps and bounds past our collective imagination and children? Well, their vocabularies, clothing, and attitudes change, however the mechanisms of learning that have been ‘hardwired’ into human brains remain the same. Our understanding of these mechanisms grows and adapts as we learn more about how children learn. The process of creating understanding – the process of reconciling startling new information with what we thought we already knew – the process of learning is fascinating.

In order to figure out how to teach, we need to understand how children learn. This is a huge commitment – a lifetime effort. This is why teachers must continually update our expertise and pursue additional learning . We need to keep up to date with current research in education, not only to renew our teaching certificates, but to deepen our understanding of the learning process and become more effective teachers.

UnCommon-Core.com offers professional development classes that address the process of teaching as well as content that is being taught. Not just because how we teach is as important as what we teach – but because who we teach is most important of all.