Eisner, E. (April 2002). The Kind of Schools We Need. Phi Delta Kappan, pp. 576-583.

• Education is not a science (more of an art) and assessments can’t be void of judgment
  • “Artistry and professional judgment will, in my opinion, always be required to teach well, to make intelligent education policy, to establish personal relationships with our students, and to appraise their growth.” (Eisner, 2002, p577)
  • “Although good teaching uses routines, it is seldom routine. Good teaching depends on sensibility and imagination. It courts surprise. It profits from caring. In short, good teaching is an artistic affair.” (Eisner, 2002, p578)
• Kinds of school’s desired and concerns about the desires
  • Time for teachers to build a community of practice
    • Teachers need a paradigm shift – they haven’t seen what is expected of them – not taught that way to begin with.
  • Teaching as a professionally public process – share what they do behind closed doors
    • Primary ignorance – what you know you don’t know
    • Secondary ignorance – what you don’t know you don’t know – need guidance and discourse
  • School Principals in the classroom
    • Time and scale constraints
  • Look at teaching exemplar examples on video, discuss, and reflect
    • Time and expert facilitation constraints
  • Questions students ask are more important than answers they give
  • Differentiation for more variance rather than reducing gaps
    • “The idea that getting everyone to the same place is a virtue really represents a limitation on our aspirations.” (Eisner, 2002, p580)
    • “The British philosopher and humanist Sir Herbert Read once said that there were two principles to guide education. One was to help children become who they are not; the other was to help children become who they are.” (Eisner, 2002, p580)
  • Develop child’s personal signature
    • “Of course, their ways of seeing things need to be enhanced and enriched, and the task of teaching is, in part, to transmit the culture while simultaneously cultivating those forms of seeing, thinking, and feeling that make it possible for personal idiosyncrasies to be developed.” (Eisner, 2002, p581)
  • Literacy with a broader definition / application
    • “I want to recast the meaning of literacy so that it refers to the process of encoding or decoding meaning in whatever forms are used in the culture to express or convey meaning.” (Eisner, 2002, p581)
  • Learning that transfers to outside of school skills
    • “The point of learning anything in school is not primarily to enable one to do well in school – although most parents and students believe this to be the case – it is to enable one to do well in life. ” (Eisner, 2002, p581)
  • The joy is in the journey
    • “It is the quality of the chase that matters most.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
    • “Alfred North Whitehead once commented that most people believe that a scientist inquires in order to know. Just the opposite is true, he said. Scientists know in order to inquire.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
    • “There is a huge difference between what a child can do and what a child will do.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
    • “It is the aesthetic that represents the highest forms of intellectual achievement, and it is the aesthetic that provides the natural high and contributes the energy we need to want to pursue an activity again and again and again.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
  • Encourage deep conversations in the classrooms – they are lacking in schools and in personal life
    • “… that is why we often tune in to Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, and other talk show hosts to participate vicariously in conversation. Even when the conversations are not all that deep, they remain interesting.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
  • Responsibility for own learning
    • “Helping students learn how to formulate their own goals is a way to enable them to secure their freedom.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
    • Teachers should also be responsible for what is taught – contextual content
    • “… in discourse about school reform and the relation of goals and standards to curriculum reform the teacher is given the freedom to formulate means but not to decide upon ends.” (Eisner, 2002, p582)
  • Public education should educate people outside of school as well
    • “And so I invite you to begin that conversation in your school. so that out of the collective wisdom of each of our communities can come a vision of education that our children deserve and, through that vision, the creation of the kind of schools that our children need.” (Eisner, 2002, p583)

Pope, D. (2001). Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 1-28, 149-175.

• Points of view
  • Administrators show off their students.
  • Students are overwhelmed – they are “doing” school
• Cases
  • Kevin – the people pleaser
  • Teresa – hard worker
• Must listen to students’ needs, frustrations, and desires