Do we trust teachers?

A good friend of mine posted this image on her Facebook page the other day and it really got me thinking. Has there really been such a paradigm shift in the thinking of parents in relation to how their little darlings are 'performing' at school. Being a parent myself there are certainly the 'over achieving' parents who will do anything to make sure their little treasure is coming first however do we by and large really trust teachers to fully educate our children?

Image by bigstockphotos.com

This thinking led me to a conversation with one of my classes this week about school reports. All of the students in the class who were parents (which was about 90%) felt that they would like someone to sit down and explain the school reports because there was so much education jargon that they really didn't understand how their child was really doing. They really felt that school reports were not in plain English. Perhaps it is these confusing reports that are really putting pressure on teachers to try and explain to parents what their student can and can't do?

It seems as though on the world stage Australia's are excelling in many areas. Science, Arts, Medicine, Innovation, technology, Agriculture yet we often hear in the media that we need more teacher training because it must be the teachers to blame for the supposedly bad school results. I find all this very confusing and conflicting and it is hard to know what to believe.

It is hardly fair of parents who have unrealistic expectations of their child and take no responsibility for their child's education outside of school hours to blame the teachers for their poor results. Perhaps it's a generational thing. Maybe kids these days spend too much time on technology and don't do the extra study and reading that previous generations did?

There is a bigger problem here though I think. In generations past teachers were rev erred and admired.
There has definitely been a shift in thinking in subsequent decades. There have been many reported cases of child abuse in both public and private schools. There have been schools and individual teachers sued because of poor school results and of course don't forget the overly scrutinised NAPLAN results that have left genuinely great schools and teachers feeling vulnerable by the lack of trust of parents in the community.

It's a real shame and I don't know how to solve the problem but I wish parents would take on board a team mentality. Children and adult learner's alike need to be in a learning partnership so that all partied have the opportunity to succeed.
During the week I watched Sugata Mitra talk about his dream for a school in the cloud. Perhaps this is where education is going in the future?



Until next week,

 K