“Don’t
Confuse Pace with Place”… Unknown
Summer is fast
approaching for most school districts.
Many of the students are walking out of the building as stronger, more
knowledgeable students. As educators,
our goal is to make sure that growth occurs, but how and when that growth
happens is something that we have very little control over. Throughout the course of the year, we confuse
two words that are similar, but have very different meanings.
It is tempting to confuse
the pace of our teaching with the place where our students should end up. Our pace is the rate at which we teach, but
that measure is subjective at best. We
are presented pacing guides and expectations of mastery, but often times this gets
in the way of the growth our students are actually experiencing.
At this point, educators
have to rest on the idea that “pace and place”
are not one in the same. Our students
don’t
learn at the same pace, but we expect, that in the same time frame, they will
ultimately complete their journey, arriving at the same place.
This goal is an
unrealistic one for so many reasons. We
are not building a culture of widgets or educating a generation of robots. Students have different developmental levels
and these must be addressed and understood.
The journey that our
students take must be celebrated, based on growth and not the speed at which it
happens. I’m
not suggesting that we devoid ourselves of pacing guides and timelines, but I
am encouraging the celebration of growth over the course of the year. AS we receive the scores on the standardized
tests, every student may not exceed the standard, but their journey of growth
is certainly worth mentioning.
As we reflect on each
individual student, we must remember that a student’s
pace may not be as swift. We are in the business
of celebrating growth and that is not determined by pace, but by the place each
individual student ultimately ends up.
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