No Recipes Wanted
Recently, due to my posting of these weekly blogs, I was connected by a friend to an educator in the Reading, PA-area who is changing the total culture and processes of public school education.
That may sound like hyperbole for those of you who have been subjected to one program after another that promises a new and improved method of educating our youth. From Hunter to Marzano, the binders/training kits were distributed to teachers as the next great “magic trick” and a panacea to cure the many ills afflicting the education system. These programs sometimes work for a bit. Teachers are trained, they plan and reshape lessons, they reorganize — all in the hope that this will now be the right way to reach all students, all the time. Within a few months, however, those programs are dropped. If every teacher is teaching the same way, using the same pattern, boredom hits a boiling point and quickly dissolves into the educator’s former practices. Boredom is always the enemy at the gate. Boredom is what dissolves the culture and stability of a school and every classroom.
Adelle Schade, a retired science teacher from Conrad Weiser High School, accidentally discovered the opposite of boredom. What most experienced teachers will tell you—it is not about entertaining the students, but instead about giving students agency to pursue their own interests. Their interests may have to be nurtured and discovered, but when given the chance to direct and discover their passions, learning is no longer a chore or something to just get through. Instead, it creates meaning and presence, engagement and excitement for all involved. When I read the documentation on Adelle’s Total Experience Program, I honestly believed that it was going to fall into one or both of these two categories—either it would only work for intrinsically motivated students, or it would be one of those programs that promise results only if the exact lesson formatting is followed. I had to see the program for myself; I had to ask the questions that come from my own struggles through a plethora of now-defunct programs.
Let me state here that as soon as I came home from my visit with Adelle and her Total Experience program, I wrote Senator Ryan Aument and proclaimed that he must— absolutely must—put Adelle Schade on his “How the Heck Do We Improve Public Education” committee (not its real name, of course, but darn—aren’t those committees boring). I also lamented that the Master’s degree courses and Total Immersion program training that she offers through Alvernia University is one I would have studied. In her headquarters, she has created: space for elementary school students from Reading; 116 city wall murals that were designed by high school students and sold throughout the Reading area; state-of-the-art science labs with cutting edge equipment; after-school and summer programs; and, my favorite because it will impact classrooms for decades in the future, student-teacher programs that include training in the total Immersion program. This revolutionary student-teacher program is so advanced that superintendents have promised that if a student teacher successfully graduates from the Total Immersion program, they will automatically be hired as classroom teachers by the district.
The program has been hired to train French soccer player students, has been written about by the United Nations, is aligned with more than 80 organizations, and has created several student-patented intellectual property, and could be duplicated and successful beyond its current reach… both the anecdotal and scientifically collected data proves it.
What makes the Total Experience program (a program I am not involved with, nor benefit from) different from the multitude of other programs out there? Imagine ingredients and tools in a kitchen; there are numerous highly trained chefs, and now, instead of following a recipe, they create a dish with the ingredients. The chefs are trained to be both technically skilled, but to also use their creativity. In turn, they train their students to do the same. It really is as simple as that.
For so many years, the billions of dollars invested in reforming education did not trust the teachers to be chefs. They trained them to be recipe followers, and then wondered why boring became the operational word. Adelle Schade and her Total Experience team trains educators and students, trusts in the process, and transforms education into what it needs to be if we are going to save it from a boredom implosion – she is creating a renaissance of creativity and practical application.