by LaDonna Hatfield

Created on: November 22, 2008

As a teacher for many years, I have weathered many storms of expert teaching methods based on the latest research to provide proven results. How can this be a problem? The problem is that we ask experts to give us research based results to specific questions, and in the United States, the current education question is "How Can We Raise Test Scores?" Unfortunately, this is a terribly limited view of the educational process, and the research has yielded terribly limited processes for "teaching" students so that we get the result of better test scores. Gone are the days of teaching students, real children. No longer can we tolerate helping a student go from where he is on the general educational plane to a higher point on the plane. Individual differences must be accounted for, but as long as the tests show the student has mastered the skill tested the way it is tested, American educators will be locked into following curricula based on expert research.

A couple of decades or so ago, I worked in a junior high school. It was the ultimate teaching experience because teachers had control of how they presented content and skills that students were expected to know at the junior high school level. The job was richly rewarding intrinsically because my colleagues and I shared information about "what works" with individual students. Together we shared ideas, identified problems, and found solutions. The student was a part of his own educational process, and teachers were free to explain to students what those students knew, what they didn't know, and how to learn what they didn't know. Even better, teachers worked together across grade levels to help students fill in learning gaps. If my reading students in 7th grade needed help understanding the concepts of figurative language, the students and I stayed with those concepts until there was a general understanding. Then I would let the 8th grade reading teacher know that this class was great with figurative language, but they were weak on identifying the mood and tone of a story or the author's purpose. Students helped teach other students, teachers gave one on one attention during lunch, and the principal was a pragmatist who told us to do whatever works. We watched test scores reliably improve in reasonable increments, and our students became more confident not just in skills and concepts, but also in their ability to learn, to teach themselves, and to teach others.

Then, the experts said that the junior high school concept

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