Dr. W.E. Doynit, superintendent of (the fictitious) Normal Unified School District (NUSD) in California, describes a completed teacher (ACT) to an audience of parents, their children, school board members, and prospective teachers.
“LEARNERS COMPLETE TEACHERS. THEY MAKE TEACHERS POSSIBLE … Without learning, teaching does not exist regardless of what someone called Teacher does.”
He goes on to say, “To teach a person to connect dots is not the end of it, …. For the learners taught, each lesson is the threshold between what their lives have been before teaching and what their lives can become. Teaching matches choices made by learners with likely consequences. It shows learners how they can choose to do what the most informed people before them have done.”
He acknowledged that each teacher faces a fundamental predicament: To continue as before or to change to using state-of-the-art practices each day in classes?
Teachers’ well trained confidence in methods to use in classrooms is assailed by an onslaught of competing images, reports, and advice – all without responsibility for handling problems teachers encounter daily – for addressing rapidly advancing technologies, international competition, and growing dissatisfaction with the academic performance levels of public school graduates.
He illustrates how New Era School Initiative (NESI) teachers resolve this predicament in ways that increase learning promptly and dramatically.