Life Style Change is Not Easy

Each time a charter school or a magnet school opens in a neighborhood and academically vastly out competes the existing neighborhood school there is great excitement over what has been accomplished by this new school that apparently the existing neighborhood school could not accomplish. Little good comes from such comparisons. For the most part the teachers in the existing school are made to feel as if they failed with those very same "neighborhood kids". The administrators take their fair share of heat as well, and that generally translates to greater pressure on teachers from the administrators.

Let's look at what is really going on and how this informs teachers in terms of better understanding their "remaining population" that did not choose to move to the magnet or charter school. The issue is really about opting for a life style. This can be brought into perspective by examining Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives of the Affective Domain.This taxonomy is much like the Cognitive Domain Taxonomy as there are progressive stages of increasingly sophisticated behaviors. This time however, the focus is not on how students operate with school lessons and learning, but rather their perceptions, interests, and values. It is about changing attitudes and developing positive behaviors that are pervasive.

Without working through the Affective Domain, working through the Cognitive Domain is much more difficult. The Affective Domain at its lowest level is concerned with students receiving information, then responding to it, moving on to organization, then and ultimately valuing. At the highest stage of valuing, a life style has been influenced. This is a complex instructional progression and well worth becoming very familiar with. What many teachers find is that they intuitively know these things, but knowing that there is a formal framework to work through defines the their work more accurately.

The bottom line is that the teachers in the existing school are working with the remaining population that has not made the life style choice of embracing school as those who have left for the magnet or charter school have. Of course the standardized test scores will be lower, the behavioral problems more frequent and the home/parental support less. The good news is, many teachers prefer the challenge.

Comments welcomed as always.

Stef