The back-to-school-night speech we’d love to hear*
*This was inspired by an occasional feature in Mad magazine called “Scenes We’d Like to See” — and counter-inspired by some back-to-school talks we’ve actually heard. It was written by Alfie Kohn, author of 14 books on education, parenting, and human behavior, including, most recently, The Myth of the Spoiled Child and Schooling Beyond Measure.
Here’s the speech by Kohn:
Is this working? [taps microphone] I do believe it is!
OK, if everyone can please find a seat, we’d like to get started. Thanks so much for coming out tonight! We’ve reserved plenty of time for discussion — obviously I’m not going to talk at you all evening, just as our teachers don’t spend most of class time talking at your kids — but as the principal I did want to try to give you a sense of what _________ School stands for, and what your student, and you, can expect this year.
Our top priority here — and I mean a real, honest-to-goodness commitment, not just a slogan on the website or in a mission statement — is to learn about and support each student’s interests. What questions do they have about the world? How can we help them build on and find answers to those questions? When we meet as a staff, it’s usually to think together about how best to do that, how to create a school that’s not just academic but intellectual.
We don’t want to write a detailed curriculum or devise a bunch of rules in advance and then spend the year demanding that kids conform to them. Our main concern is that what students are learning, and how they’re helped to learn it, make sense for the particular kids in a given room. That’s why our teachers spend a lot more time asking than telling — and even more time listening to what the kids wonder about. The plan for learning is created withyour kids, not just for them.
Take Ms. _______ and Mr. ________, who are both standing in the back of the room, over there near the fire alarm. (Say hello!) They teach the same grade and the same subjects, but do they have the same curriculum — the same topics in the same order with the same reading list and assignments? Well, of course not! They teach different kids! And I happen to know that much of what each of them is teaching this year is different from what they were teaching last year. For the same reason.
A good way to tell how successful we are is how excited the students are about figuring stuff out and playing with ideas. Nurturing their desire to learn is The back-to-school-night speech we’d love to hear* - The Washington Post: