My List of Three

Jason Glass, the nominated head of Iowa Education has asked three questions on his website Education Elements

1. What should we stop doing?

2. What should we keep doing?

3. What should we start doing?

Here are my ideas...

Stop: Gutting school libraries!
Research shows how important an integrated librarian and library collection are to the learning process- research skills, digital citizenship, literacy, collaboration. These are all integral parts of a librarian’s knowledge base and SO needed in today’s schools – yet our voice is completely lost in the clamor for new and better. We are the voice of literacy and reading yet too often we are not even invited to the conversation.

Keep: Iowa Core
Many have more clearly articulated this important aspect of our curriculum

Start: Narrowing our focus to the essentials – students.
We have removed the face of the child from most of our conversations – they are subjects and items and numbers. We need to begin with who they are today. As others have said, we are preparing them for a world that doesn’t exist. So, we need to start with the skills of flexibility and problem solving. You can’t do that when our testing focused curriculum requires a regurgitation of list of dates.