CURMUDGUCATION: Risk and Rules

CURMUDGUCATION: Risk and Rules:

Risk and Rules

In his excellent look at the value of teacher coaches, Peter DeWitt drops this line with an important embedded assumption:

In order for coaching to work properly, the school has to have a climate conducive to learning, which means that there needs to be a balance between risk-taking and rule following. 

A climate conducive to learning has to have a balance between risk-taking and rule-following. That notion really resonates with me, because I see teaching as an ongoing balancing act. And some of that balance is between risk and rules.

I spend a lot of time railing against rules and restrictions and oppressive demands for one-size-fits-all conformity, but my first published education rant was a letter to the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) journal complaining about the loose foolishness of whole language approaches. I'm a lot less tightly wound than when I was younger, but I really don't have much trouble understanding the point of view of conservative commenters on education.

Larry Cuban captures the age-old tension in a recent post. 

Two traditions of teaching have competed with one another for millennia.  Each has had a grab-bag of names over the centuries: conservative vs. liberal, hard vs. soft pedagogy, subject-centered vs. child-centered, traditional vs. progressive, teacher-centered vs. student-centered, mimetic vs. transformational.

Each tradition has its own goals (transmit knowledge to next generation vs. helping children grow CURMUDGUCATION: Risk and Rules: