Standing at the crossroads of everything

There may not be many issues on which every rational person can agree, but one of those is certainly the importance of children and their learning.

Consequently, everyone seems to have an opinion about elementary education.

Bloggers agree that kids should blog. Nature lovers insist they should spend more time outside. Musicians are convinced every kid should play an instrument. Inquiry advocates want to see them wondering and wandering, while politicians seem to want to see them at rows of desks with their heads buried in a test. 'Makers' think children should tinker. Counselors think emotional and social health is paramount. Children should think globally, be involved in their communities, pursue their interests, try new things, etc, ad nauseum. They voice those opinions because they are speaking from their passions.

And they're all right. Children should do all those things, and more, and great teachers know it.

Elementary educators stand at the crossroads of everything charged with the responsibility to nurture and protect the future's most important asset.

In order to function as a curator of everything, I think the key is to balance breadth and depth of learning in my classroom.

Breadth
By maintaining rigorous routines and keeping inquiries as well-organized and progressive as possible, I ensure that my students travel many paths, including teacher-, peer-, and self-initiated, and have a wide variety of opportunities to explore and discover. I find the IB Learner Profile to be quite useful as a reference. Utilizing a range of media is important to keep in mind, including technology from the stone age to the information age. It's very easy for teachers to find "what works" and spend a career sticking to it. That's bad for students, in my opinion. I challenge myself to expand my approaches to teaching constantly and enjoy it.

Depth
In every school year, at any grade level, my class will have a unit on jazz music. It's what I know and love and can teach more fluently and passionately than anything else, and that's what my students deserve. In the legendary photo below, many of New York City's most revered jazz musicians gathered (with a dozen or so neighborhood kids) for a group photo. If a typical picture is worth a thousand words, this one is worth at least one-hundred thousand. It's important to empower children to follow their inquiries as deeply as they wish and to provide excellent examples of how it can be done.

A Great Day in Harlem 1958 photo by Art Kane

In his 2013 TED Prize winning talk, Sugata Mitra posits that in the future, knowing will be obsolete. I don't agree, but that doesn't matter because it's not my future he's predicting, it's that of the children in my class. It's not for me to decide what their future should be, but to provide them with opportunities to prepare for and participate in it.