I keep hearing about School Choice and how important it is for families to be able to choose where the kids go to school. What that means is...I want my choice for schools and I don't really care about your choice unless it matches my choice.
My wife and I made our choice for schools. We decided that public schools would be the best for our kids. More importantly, we decided that we needed to make our schools CHOICE SCHOOLS. Not just for our kids, but for all the students at the school.
What is a choice school? A place where the student and teacher both feel safe in sharing an exploration of learning. Where a teacher is able to use their strengths to help students gain the same love of learning that brought them to teaching in the first place. And where the student feels safe to discover who they are and what they are passionate about.
Choice Schools are all about learning. And that means all the stakeholders are learning, not just the students. For example...
Students learn about themselves and what they want to do and why they want to do it. They learn how to learn.
Teachers learn how to be better at what they already do well...Teaching students to love learning just like they do.
Parents learn how to support their student in their pursuit of learning and how to keep learning themselves.
Administrators learn how to encourage all the other groups to continue learning as they learn to help others learn.
Why all the emphasis on learning? Because life is all about learning. When you stop learning, you just stop. And when you stop, you may never start again.
So what is a Choice School? A safe place to learn. For everyone. And who makes it a Choice School? Everyone.
In the future I will be writing about what I learn about schools and the present and future of education. I invite ideas here because that is how we all learn...by sharing.
Thanks for reading...I hope you learn something.
Steve Asay
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