The community, as a concept, is where the action is not only when dealing with environmental, social and political issues, but is one of the most important ideas for us to incorporate into our approach to teaching.  A teacher, in a sense, is a community organizer who works with a group of students to teach ideas about science (or any other content area including mathematics, history, political science, art, music, or physical education).

Teachers who embody the community organizer concept understand how their students learn, and they also know what assessment strategies will enhance their students learning. According to Page Keely, President of the National Science Teachers Association (The Science Teacher, Vol. 75, No.6, September 2008, pp. 10 -11)

There is an urgent call for change in science education—deep, transformative changes in teaching and learning and the public perception of science.

Deep, transformative changes in teaching begins from the bottom and extends to the top.  Although science education has benefited from top-down programs, such as the curriculum reform projects in the later part of the last century, real change in science education is more of a local or community affair, not a national one.  Teams of teachers in school, perhaps part of a single department of science, or part of an interdisciplinary team, or several schools working together locally to explore ways of improving teaching learning—this is where the action is.

Perhaps one of the interesting examples of how change at the classroom community level has impacted teaching is the idea of formative assessment.  Elsewhere in this blog, I have called for the elimination of high-stakes testing as way of assessing our students.  I strongly favor other methods of assessment, and formative assessment is one of them.  Let me explain.

Formative assessments are everyday methods that teachers use to help students improve their learning and understanding of teaching, and to inform and improve their teaching.  Formative assessment exist in the action of the classroom community. These are assessments that are embedded within instruction and its been shown that teachers that do this have a powerful impact on student learning.  In fact, researchers in the U.K. and the U.S.A. have shown that student-learning improvement is among the largest every reported for educational interventions.

Why is this important?  In the USA and indeed in other countries as well, there is a battle over the locus of control of learning.  Right now the dominant force is large scale, including both state-level and national, control of education, principaly determined in the USA by the No Child Left Behind Act.  In some locations, the state has taken over large school districts, and in fact the Governor of Georgia is determined to change the law to enable the “state” to come in and take over a school district. Governor Perdue is motivated after the Clayton County School District (a community just south of Atlanta) lost its accreditation.

The locus of control, even for Clayton County, for example, must lie at the local level, not at the state or federal level.  The loss of accreditation in Clayton County has been disasterous for the teachers, students and parents in this county.  Instead of trying to rely of rich resources within the various communities that exist in the county, an outside temporary superintendent was hired for a term of about 1.5 years, and the governor wants to send in the State Department of Education to “rescue” the schools.

In my view, this is a mistake.  The solutions exist at the community level, here and in every district in the nation.  What do you think?

And, by the way, if you think I am motivated by the political scene in the USA today, you are correct.  Small is beautiful.