"A teacher affects eternity; one can never tell where a teacher's influence stops." This time-honored proverb is truer than ever today. Never before in history has the success, and perhaps even the survival, of nations and people been so tightly tied to their ability to learn. Our future depends now, as never before, on our ability to teach.
Teaching is indeed a nation's lifeline. Effective teaching is the collaborative weaving of educational threads by students and teachers, who together will create the fabric of future generations and shape the wisdom, health, and very soul of nations.
As we move toward the dawn of the 21st century, the challenge for educators and the education systems in our countries is daunting indeed. The challenge of the next millennium will be to advance a new kind of teaching—one that is very different from what we have known for most of this century.
If students are to learn in the ways that the new education standards and reforms suggest and that today's complex society demands, teaching will need to go far beyond dispensing information, giving tests, and assigning grades. We will need to teach in ways that respond to students' diverse approaches to learning, that take advantage of students' unique starting points, and that carefully scaffold work aimed at eliciting more proficient student performances. To add to the challenge, the millennium generation is more diverse than any that preceded it, and demographic data suggest that this diversity will become increasingly pronounced. Given these goals and conditions, effective teaching isn't rocket science—it's harder!
A New Role for Teachers
In his 1997 book Inventing Better Schools: An Action Plan for Educational Reform, Phil Schlechty challenges our assumptions about the teacher's role. He advocates that teachers should be viewed as inventors and as leaders of knowledge workers—rather than as performers. Today, it's commonplace to think of the teacher as a performer or a service delivery professional. We often assume that the most important things that occur in the classroom are those things the teacher does. The teacher's performance is important, of course, but student performance is more important.
Teachers are leaders. Their challenge is to get all students to perform at higher levels than they have before. Teachers must also help their students become knowledge workers: people who can apply facts and use ideas, problem-solving skills, and analytic skills to achieve some end. Today, nearly everyone must learn to work on and with knowledge.
Consequently, we need not only to enhance teachers' knowledge of content and pedagogy but also to provide specific support for their efforts to teach in better ways in the classroom. The power of professional communities to support instructional innovation has been seen clearly in schoolwide, districtwide, and regional improvement efforts. Thus, we must pay special attention to nurturing and sustaining professional communities in which enhanced practice can be developed and supported.
Expanding Choices
Helping teachers enhance their practice is central to ASCD's work. ASCD's recent "Pledge to the Children of the New Millennium" renewed our commitment to making a difference for children by serving those who shape their learning.
One way we are pursuing this goal is through collaborations. For example, in 1998, ASCD joined with the Tregoe Foundation to form the Compass Quest Consortium. The Consortium is composed of 13 middle schools, although the number is growing. Each school has a corporate coach who dedicates 10–15 days each year to training teachers in problem solving and decision making. As ASCD expands its horizons, we look forward to more collaborative projects that support teachers and other educators.
Education leaders know that successful preparation of our youth for the 21st century will require new models and understandings of how we learn and develop independence—and the involvement of the entire community. Education leaders also realize that teachers must have the power to shape their own destinies.
Thornton Wilder once said that "we do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind." Teaching and learning, at all levels, should expand the choices available to our children as they seek to live their lives.