Feel Free Read Back to the One Room Schoolhouse: The New Norm in Education PDF

The Black Plague of the Middle Ages led to the Renaissance; the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 rolled into the Roaring 20s. What will the world look like post-Covid-19? What will education look like ? Read and become excited about new possibilities. Change will be in the forefront as a new age enters where a computer device for every child is standard. Will your school be on the forefront of this change, or will your school be left behind? Through the use of humor, this short book builds a case for abandoning public school education’s century old K-12 grade configuration. It challenges readers to go even further than that. It argues to end the traditional summer vacation, to build an outcomes based educational system where students progress at their own speed, to initiate multiage classrooms, to redefine the role of the teacher, and to repurpose federal and state education funds. The author looks in the playground and sees children of various ages playing together? He looks to the adult workforce and affirms that adults of various ages interact? He questions the reasons for a modern K-12 grade configuration in schools. He points out that many of the reasons that made this configuration necessary no longer exist. He postulates that computer technology and learning management systems now make the K-12 configuration ineffective. Creating a story of a fictitious company named Edgewater, the book proposes that tradition sometimes stands in the way of progress. Edgewater, a company based on the premise of attaching long ropes to ships to insure that they could not drop off the edge of a flat world, transformed itself into a modern insurance company. To do that, it had to give up its ropes, a concept traditional to its core. In a like way, our modern K-12 educational system must give up some of its traditional core. As the book continues, it follows the adventures of Timothy Mansfield, a fictitious one-room schoolhouse teacher from a real one-room schoolhouse in Colorado. Methods used in his one-room school seem appropriate to instruction in the 21st century United States. Differentiation of instruction, assessment, grouping of students, a multi-age classroom structure, and “edu-worlds” are addressed. As education enters the post-pandemic new norm, these changes need to be considered. The author suggests that a new competitor to public school education will arise. He calls this competitor the "Exemplary Teacher School Movement." He suggests that exemplary teachers (teachers who are so good as to establish their own parent following) will become a direct competitor to public school education. He challenges public schools to establish a new educational norm. Using the words of Winston Churchill, he urges public schools to "not waste a good crisis." This book is only sixty pages long, but it is powerful in its message. It should become required reading for all school superintendents, school board members, professors of education, students aspiring towards leadership roles in K-12 education, and all exemplary teachers.