21stcenturyed.com

June, July and August.

If those are three of the reasons you got into education, you may have chosen the wrong profession. Like social workers, doctors and other professions, educators have a serious charge: to help others.

So – sorry. It’s not really about you – it’s about them. The sooner you accept and embrace this truth – and live it out through your professional life – the sooner you’ll make real change in students’ lives.

Online educators, especially, must come to recognize that:

• …learning will not necessarily occur between 8:30 am and 3:30 pm.
• Students won’t always want to learn a topic the way you were trained to teach it – nor do they have to since they now have choices in education.
• What make school easier for you is not necessarily what is best for students. Like bell schedules, synchronous instruction or quiet classrooms.

So get over yourself. It’s not about you. Make the time to call your students and their parents. Stop reinventing the wheel just so you can say you wrote a great lesson. That’s time you could have spent explaining a difficult student to a student who needs you.

I challenge you to take 30 minutes to examine what and how you do things related to your teaching and to identify at least one thing that you could be doing to better meet the student needs.

No – I’m not here to stump for McCain, Obama or even Nader (am I the only one who was surprised to see that name on the ballot?).

Instead – in the spirit of the election – I want to talk about choosing a different kind of candidate: your online school program’s next teacher.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently spent three months as a High School program administrator, starting up the school year for an existing online school run by my employer. One of the most important tasks I faced was that of hiring new online teachers. In trying to fill these positions I learned some valuable lessons: Read more »