Move Toward

Photo by Alonso Navarro on Unsplash

If you are reading this, you probably already know the job of a teacher isn’t what it appears.

Much of it is unmeasurable in terms of success. While the general public depends on state tests and enrollment rates, the impact that teachers make goes far beyond. What teachers do every day in every interaction matters. What you do everyday matters. I don’t want to get hyperbolic here, but you don’t know when you are really impacting students, and you have the power to inspire and engage or harm and disengage. Oh, and most teachers also have a huge workload, limited time to do it and, often, resources that don’t live up to the need.

So, and again you probably know this, while teachers want to improve in their craft, there is limited time to learn about and implement dynamic, programmatic changes that may impact students. Profound change can come over time, and it is all about moving toward learning-centered educational transformation.

At Move Toward, we believe in the integration of strategies, practices and mindsets that empower teachers to engage students in their own learning. It is not about one more thing, but it is about integrating great practices with what is already happening to build on the strengths and raise the thinking and learning level within the classroom so that the thinking and learning will transfer to the world outside of the classroom. We want to move toward learning-centered educational transformation, and we do it by making small improvements to our practice.

• We move toward understanding rather than knowledge.

• We move toward student agency rather than student passivity.

• We move toward discovery rather than transmission.

• We move toward deep thinking over curriculum coverage.

We want to move toward the integration of high-leverage, high impact practices with the curriculum that exists, and it can be done in a meaningful way. These practices are not part of a design committee or a long curriculum renewal process. They are easily integrated strategies that you can implement in your next unit to increase the level of understanding an increase a students’ ability to learn how to learn.

I am not a researcher, nor do I want to be, but research is important in what we do as K-12 teachers. We need to understand the work of researchers to improve our practice. My role is to understand the research and translate it to the K-12 world. I take the theory of the research and use my experience and practical knowledge to apply it to the classroom while giving a broad explanation so that educators can apply it as well as well as useful practices to use.  

As I will continually say on this site and in person, it is not easy, and I have no intention of making it sound easy, but it is possible to move toward an educational model where the student is doing as much thinking as the teacher. Too often we take the responsibility of learning on ourselves as educators, and it does a disservice to the students. Let’s build a community where students thoughtfully interact with each other and the content to build the skills and understanding that transfer to their future endeavors and enhance their present ones.