Educational Philosohy of the Month

As I have worked on my own educational philosophy over the past week, I have spent a bit of time reviewing different web sites and blogs to get a feel for what other teachers say and think about education. The themes and models seem endless and they seem to change so quickly. During my 21 years as a software engineer, I thought I was used to being in an environment where everyone was looking at the latest piece of technology. Those of us who had been in the development field often referred to the new tools and toys as silver bullets. Everyone was looking for the perfect tool to slay the evil programming problem. But unlike the movies, the old engineers realized that there were no silver bullets. It was all about hard work, discipline, and a bit of flexibility in the way we think and approach a problem. There was never going to be a programming language or software tool that would solve everybodies problems. But there were ways to use the existing tools and some of the new ones more effectively to solve problems. It is what made a good engineer valuable and the rest of the players just programmers or hacks.
During the last 8 years of my engineering career, I began teaching college classes at night. As adjunct faculty, I was somewhat isolated from the politics of the college. Teaching philosophies and the latest teaching fads were not something that night school teachers had to deal with more than once a semester at semi-annual training sessions. One just had to keep the student critiques in the right range and you could teach as you thought best. But after I retired from my technology career and began to take classes for my teaching license, I began to be exposed to many different educational silver bullets. Each education class and professor I had followed a different "method" for the best way to reach students. After first, I assumed this was just a good way to expose us to different concepts. But then I began to teach.
I teach at a middle school and over the 6 years that I have been at this school, we have had 5 different school or district philosophies. Each has had something to offer, but before we could really make the new one work we were off exploring a new way to slay poor standardized test scores. The programs we used just fell be the wayside. Whats a teacher to do but follow along. Unfortunately, some just quite trying and pay lip service to whatever current approach is being forced on them. I oftern wonder whether there would be nearly as many approaches if a disertation was not required for most Doctorate degrees. If we eliminated the need to come up with a new silver bullet to get a degree, would highly educated teachers spend more time learning to use the tools we have already discovered. That's not to say new ideas are all bad, but sometimes its nice to have an expert at something we know trying to help a student who is having trouble learning.
I am not sure if it is politically correct to reference someone else's Blog while writting your own, but I did find one that seemed to be searching for the same goal as my own. David Truss asked the question in his own educational philosophy (http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/statement-of-educational-philosophy/), "I wonder how much of what I have written is ‘universal’ and how much of it is a product of being stuck in the current bureaucratic-age based paradigm?" I think its important to ask why we believe as we do. Is it what we were told to believe, a rut we are stuck in, or something we are passionate about. We all need to remember the first line of David's philosophy, "The goal of education is to enrich the lives of students..." because if it is not all about the students, then its time to leave the classroom.