When They Tried To Steal Our Classrooms
by Amy Lindahl. Rethinking Schools
Key Points:
This article is from Portland, so is very local to us. The article talks about the redesign and plans for new schools in the Portland School District. But what happened when the plans were unveiled, was the teachers found out about "100% utilization", where every classroom would be used every period, so less classrooms would be needed. Teachers would lose their classrooms for prep time, and could be in several different classrooms throughout the day. As one teacher put it, "100% utilization equals 100% chaos". Students would have a hard time finding where their teacher was, teachers wouldn't have quiet areas to help students one on one, and they would have to have a cart of materials that would have to be stocked and ready to go for any lesson that the teacher would need. Making teaching even more difficult.
Relevance:
As populations around the area grow, and more kids are coming to our schools, it is important to remember that maximum efficiency of a building shouldn't outweigh the education of our students. They are the ones we should be building the buildings for, not the efficiency gurus.
Audience: Community, teachers, students, administrators, parents.
This seems like a farce. Not the article itself, but the idea. When I look at this plan, I can't see this going well in any way, shape, or form. It would seem that this could have the ability of being useful only if the school where it was being implemented were being built. Otherwise, its a fancy way of calling efficiency "crowd control" which may do the exact opposite. Maybe the people who are behind this policy think that by moving teachers around they would have the ability to have more staff in the same amount of space. Not really sure about this, but thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeleteIt think this local article was very interesting in redesigning the function of schools to maximum efficiency of a building. I see how this would have issues in the difficulty of teaching, especial at a lower levels. The post addresses problems in student navigating multiple classroom locations and teacher not having their own classroom to work. However, this does work at the college level and there are spaces for instructors for teachers to work one on one, so this might actually work in high school. This is an interesting debate.
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