Deborah Meier - A Complete Teacher

“I can not stress enough the importance of the kind of leisure you had his week,” she said in opening. The round of applause that greeted her comment made her laugh.

“As teachers, we hope that something we teach or do will make a difference,” she said. Meier went on to recap her professional life, working in Harlem for the New York City school system, founding, among others, the Central Park Elementary School, a highly successful alternative school emphasizing active learning.

“There are now more good, progressive-minded schools in New York City than there have been cumulatively in the history of New York City schools,” she said. “But there weren’t many then.”

In her schools, Meier fostered a sense of democratic community, giving teachers autonomy in the running of the school, giving parents a voice in what happened to their children in school.

“We need to strengthen the coalition of teachers to deal with the challenges that face us,” she said. “Teaching’s a tough business. Every day’s tough, every day’s an experiment. Daily, we make decisions that we do not know are right ones. Even a well-prepared mind is not enough. Teaching is always vulnerable.”

Meier said that teachers go about their business in private. That secrecy is rooted in the history of modern teaching. In St. Louis, she explained, no teacher could be married, and one got by by not arguing with ‘downtown’ if possible. It was how one coped with powerlessness.

“So create climates of collegiality; work in concert,” she advised. And what is collegiality? “A community of seekers after truth,” she said.

“Can you go into a colleague’s classroom, sit and listen to the lesson, then discuss it afterward?” Whether one can or can not speaks to the comfort level of individual teachers, and likely, of the climate of the school.

She applauded standards of accountability, standardization and standardized testing, but said that somehow along the way, a powerful idea had been trivialized.

And Meier called schools the last refuge of thoughtfulness. “We need to find refuges—like small schools. Places in which to revitalize. We can not trim our voices as professionals.

“Remember, resistance by teachers as well as kids is honorable,” she said with a smile that lit her blue eyes.

2004 Summer Institute

Science

Dr. Fred Newmann

Leadership Network