What Is Teaching About As We Enter The 2024-2025 School Year?

When I started my career teaching English in the 1990s, the elders in the profession who took me under their wing focused my attention on learning and gaining mastery of the curriculum and planning lessons that were going to deliver to students "what they needed to know." I was fortunate to be able to benefit from such guidance. Probably in part because I showed such deference to these colleagues, I was given access to any of the source and research material they had gathered as they transitioned into retirement. Having this happen to me during the first three years of my career really gave me a head start in comparison to colleagues around the country who, too often, had to go it largely alone, for various reasons, during the initial years of their careers.

More than two decades ago, students in suburban New York City were different than they are today, though not as different as a lot of us like to think.

Apple released its initial version of the IPhone in 2008. I recall cell phones becoming a serious disturbance in my classes by 2010. Around that time, because I've always been open to trying new things, I was afforded the chance to be one of the first teachers in my school district to experiment in my classroom with the initial generation of white boards. I watched as more and more students started pushing back agianst taking class notes on paper. I was one of the first teachers I knew who allowed students to line up and take pictures on their phones of notes I put on my white board. I noticed an immediate boost in quiz grades.

You could say my career has been witness to the slow, painful death of student use of pens/pencils on looseleaf paper in notebooks/binders in school. And now that laptops and other aspects of the tech takeover have become ubiquitous in our schools, where are we? Nowhere great.

Between regularly needed device chargers (2 to 4 students, each of five periods, most school days) and broken or lost laptops, students being unprepared for class feels like an issue greater than its ever been in my career. My school's "fix it" department can't/doesn't keep up with the laptop repairs. Too many parents do not ensure the laptops their students are given are covered by the offered insurance. So when their children drop and break them, the $30 for the insurance they didn't pay becomes a much greater fee to fix or replace. The most common "fix it" I've seen in my school dominated by Latino and African American students (most of whom are not poor!) is students start sharing laptops.

Some of what we should be teaching is how students (as well as ourselves!) should be organizing all of the work we have been saving so that it is easily accessible in the years to come. School should be about students building a personal database of information they have researched from class to class and year to year. Their graduation from high school should be about moving on in their lives with a lot of evaluated work upon which they can build when ready, either for formal or informal purposes.

In our respective classrooms, we should also be teaching students how to use their mobile devices competently in intellectual, not just social pursuits. We should be teaching them how to differentiate between quality and non-valid sources. A competent manner of doing this is to convince students of the merits of taking the time to review primary source material. The mountain of individualized material we are sent on our mobile devices via algorithms and/or artifical intelligence (AI) pose profound challenges to our ability to decipher how much of it is actually true versus entertaining. We ought to be creating lessons and/or classroom experiences that support our students in understanding the difference.

Team teaching of interdisciplinary units continues to be an under-utilized pedagogical approach.

Our lesson and unit plans should also be guided by the fact that in most of our communities, the majority of our students will never complete a college level of education. And they don't have to. There are a myriad of ways to make money legally that do not require a bachelor's degree. Most adults in America, right now, do not own one. In 1982, 19% of American adults had a bachelor's degree. Today that number is less than 40%. It's unlikely that this number is getting much higher.

This does not mean that we shouldn't be affording our students opportunities to examine in our classrooms quality content that is relevant to their futures. This means across subject areas and throughout all grade levels, we should be supporting student examination of topics such as climate change and ways our species might be able to address the issue, assuming there's still time; challenges and implications to permanent human colonies on the Moon, Mars, and beyond; factors influencing national and international demographic shifts; present and future workforce trends.

We need to examine whether we have gone too far in our schools with tech. We need to bring back phonics-based English language acquisition and development in schools. We need to stand firmly and united in the face of politically motivated attacks against the teaching of literature and topics that ensure diverse, traditionally marginalized experiences are and remain part of the taught curriculum.

Being an educator who makes a serious difference in the life of a young person, let alone many, requires a ton of courage.

Finally, mainstream teachers ought to be moving away from classrooms with traditional rows while being the omnipotent distributor of knowledge standing firm at the front of the classroom. So many teachers continue to teach this way, while coming up with a myriad of justifications that could really be about being too afraid to release much more control to their students. Control is one of our largest illusions.

Nnamari Consulting can help further this conversation while also providing valuable, virtual feedback to your understanding of what is (or is not) happening in your classroom.