Brenda RubinoProfessor SchmidtEnglish 122April 25, 2014Essay 3: Rough DraftCreating an Environment for GrowthThe elementary school public education system is in trouble and there are more ideas on how to change it than one person can digest. Most of the ideas are addressing the wrong question. Instead of focusing on what can be added or what can be changed, we need to look at what is missing. Children are inherently curious, creative, and diverse; if we keep this in mind, the answers are clear. Nurture their natural pathways of learning in a collaborative environment and standardized testing can become a thing of the past. What matters most is guiding students to grow with a solid balance ...view middle of the document...
The change that must occur is change in teacher's perspective. In Don Tapscott's book, "Macrowikinomics, Rebooting Business and the world," he has a chapter on rethinking secondary education that can easily be applied to the elementary level. Tapscott suggests, "Replace traditional departments with a new set of problem-focused disciplines," in other words, appeal to the curious mind to foster creativity and a diverse set of outcomes will be created. It is within this process that innate motivation occurs and instantaneously you have a room full of engaged students that want more academic information to apply to solving the problem. It is simply using the student's natural instincts to create a learning environment instead of forcing them into an arena that promotes conformity and repetitious memorization that adds no value.Not all ideas from the past are so outdated that they cannot be applied to increasing the level of education of today. Bloom's Taxonomy, developed in 1956, reevaluated, and published in 2001 by researcher Lorin Anderson provides an ideal pathway to ensuring mastery of subjects for each student. Bloom's Taxonomy provides clear and concise building blocks, and addresses seven levels to measure in order to gauge student comprehension, far different from the busy work of crossword puzzles and copying information from a textbook. A student shows mastery of a subject when he/she can use higher level thinking, progressively, by remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating from the new information they have attained.Attaining information is all well and good, but if a portion of the information is lost during long periods of leisure time, then what good is it. Research shows that not only do students lose about two months' worth of math skills, but it has also been shown that teachers need to spend four to six weeks re-teaching this information and even more significant is that because of this learning loss, low income groups suffer even more loss...
