Her points about critically thinking are the way we should go about this reform. Most teachers are afraid to go against administrative requirements. Does this mean that it is their fault? Maybe our focus should not be on teacher reform but on the administrative requirements themselves. Is is so wrong to choose your job over choosing to give a better education? Some would say yes, but what if those teachers have families that rely on those job's wages?
My worst teaching experiences have been at both extremes. One extreme is a teacher who strictly follows administrative education. Some teachers can get away with this by making the information fun, but some teachers lose sight of what learning really is. The latter usually just lecture and not much is retained. The other extreme are the older teachers who don't care anymore. Not all older teachers are like this, but some go off on tangents about this and that and because they've been there so long the administration can't really do anything about it.
Critically thinking can be effective in many ways. It can be used like my example of the teacher who made the administrative requirements fun. This might have been what Jenni from the reading tried. Also, critically thinking teachers could try to challenge administration and get the requirements changed. I've heard of this working in some cases. Some teachers don't even try.
This goes back to the idea in our floating foundations reading. Without critical thinking, education can not evolve with our changing environment. There are critically thinking teachers out there, but I believe Marilyn was right in her writing to ask for more. I say we could take it a step further and ask for administration to start critically thinking about their own curriculum requirements more often in our changing education system.
