Give Teachers Autonomy to Arrange Schools So Students Want to Learn

Most efforts at improvement assume that the job of adults is to deliver education to students. Is it possible that our over-reliance on the delivery framework has led us to spend our time and energy on solving the wrong problem? What would school look like if we didn’t assume that delivery had to look a certain way?

As Kim Farris-Berg and her colleagues reported in Trusting Teachers with School Success, teachers who design and run schools often seek to nurture students’ engagement and motivation via learning programs that put students in a position to be active learners. With authority to collectively make the decisions influencing whole school success, many teachers place a strong emphasis on helping each student figure out their sources of motivation, and how to tap into those sources in order to learn and graduate.

Teachers who call the shots also understand that that nurturing motivation means a change in how they work. They must move from “experts who impart information” to “unfinished learners.”

Learn more about these teachers’ work in this guest post Farris-Berg wrote for the Of, By, For Education Week blog.

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Designing student engagement strategies