We need to rethink how we teach our children, according to Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp ... [+]
Not content with shaking up teacher recruitment, the founder of Teach For America has set her sights on transforming education around the world.
Instead of a narrow focus on academic outcomes, schools should aim to develop skills such as critical thinking and problem solving, says Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach For America in her senior year in college.
Teach For America aims to transform teacher recruitment by targeting high-flying graduates from leading universities to work in low-income communities.
Although not without its critics, Teach For America has inspired similar programs in 60 other countries, including Teach First in the U.K., brought together under the Teach For All umbrella.
And now Kopp, although no longer involved in leading Teach For America, has set her sights on system-wide change, through an initiative called Teaching as Collective Leadership, which aims to harness the expertise of school leaders in the pursuit of a transformational approach to education around the globe.
“Our systems are focused so narrowly on academic outcomes, which are important, but sometimes academic outcomes are at the expense of developing students’ agency and self-awareness, awareness of the world and critical thinking and problem-solving,” says Kopp, founder and CEO of Teach For All.
“We should move from a narrow conception of what schools are working to accomplish towards developing students holistically, so that they can lead us to a better place.”
Wendy Kopp, with President George W. Bush in 2002 (Photo by Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images)
This means equipping students with skills including the ability to manage uncertainty and to solve the increasingly complex problems they are likely to face in the future, she adds.
This belief that education is in need of a complete overhaul comes, at least in part, from a realization that decades of investment has made little progress in eliminating educational inequities.
And the transformation means letting go of the model where attempts to improve outcomes are driven by an experimental approach, through randomized controlled trials aimed at measuring the impact of different approaches.
“We need to move from that towards a people-first approach that invests in collective leadership as a path to system change,” says Kopp.
“When you look at how many decades we have seen massive inequities in our system, we need to recognize that business as usual is not going to get us to where we want to be.”
Kopp suggests that Teach For America, along with its partner organizations in other countries, helps inculcate the skills needed to deliver this change, as well as the commitment required.
“We need to step back and ask ourselves, given our values and given the state of the world and the opportunities we face, what is our fundamental purpose? What do we want to be true about our young people,” she says.
This also means moving away from a system that measures success purely in grades and that holds schools accountable according to that narrow definition of success.
“We need better and better measures of academic success,” Kopp says. “We need to rethink what we’re measuring and how we’re developing people in the system.
Wendy Kopp (Pic: Teach For All)
“Measurement is so important and continuous improvement is so important, but where do we put our energy? We need a balance in the system, and measuring holistic outcomes for kids is going to be a piece of that puzzle.”
And while solutions will differ, the challenges facing education systems around the world have much in common.
“In every country there are marginalized groups who face so many extra challenges,” she says. “There are remarkable similarities about what the fundamental solutions are.”
Kopp’s proposals find echoes in the ideas of Sir Ken Robinson, one of education’s most innovative thinkers, whose last book, completed after his death by his daughter, set out a vision of 21st century schools as bastions of creativity, collaboration and compassion.
What they both have in common is they are motivated by a belief that it will take extraordinary skills to meet the challenges ahead, whether it is combating climate change or feeding a growing population.
And overcoming these challenges requires an approach that not only encourages students to become active learners but equips them with the skills they will need.
“We’re not going to have students being passive receptacles of education suddenly turn on a dime and proactively solve the world’s problems,” Kopp says. “What we’re doing in our classrooms today is going to predict how we improve tomorrow.”
If this all sounds a bit theoretical, Kopp admits that it is very much at the conceptual stage. A key task of Teaching for Collective Leadership will be to explore ways to put it into practise.
Kopp also acknowledges that schools alone will not be able to bring about the transformation needed, when so much of their ability to change lives is affected by what goes on outside school.
But the fact that such an influential voice in education is advocating for change is a powerful argument that something radical needs to happen to the way we teach our children.
