Buzzwords

Over the thirty-four years I’ve been in the classroom as a teacher, student teacher, substitute, and education major, I’ve watched a parade of buzzwords come, and most of them go. Each of these words was associated with a teaching or discipline strategy that was touted as the perfect solution to every problem the education community was facing at the time. Some are still around, albeit many have changed names throughout the years even though the concepts remain the same (ie. Essential Elements of Education). More have been thrown out or simply allowed to fade away, often with a new program emerging with exactly the opposite philosophy being the newest rage (Assertive Discipline has given way to non-threatening discipline techniques).

Some of the buzzwords across the nation today include No Child Left Behind, best practices, higher-order thinking, and collaboration. Since collaboration is a word I hear often in my own school and district, I found a recent discussion on the international Library Media listserv (LM-NET) to be quite interesting.

It seems that the biggest problem with collaboration comes with defining of the term itself. In some districts nationwide the concept means forming a lock-step way of approaching the teaching, assignments, and testing processes for a given subject matter. In others it means to have cross-curricular planning where history, math, science, and language arts teachers work to formulate lessons that allows subject integration into a single project with common objectives. Some include the library media specialist in the planning stages, as they should. A few members of the discussion said the word collaboration should be discarded altogether because what is really accomplished is mere planning instead. Others labeled the process coordination or cooperation. The general consensus is that collaboration does not exist in any of their schools.

As most of the librarians noted, true collaboration takes time, lots of it, with educators working together toward instruction. Unfortunately, discretionary time during the day is rare and to find time elsewhere means that teachers are either giving up their own time to collaborate or the students are losing valuable instructional time. Toni Buzzeo, author of Collaborating to Meet Literacy Standards (Linworth Publishing, 2006) says “collaboration involves not just team-planning, but team-teaching and team-evaluating of student learning.”

Perhaps, as Mike Eisenberg of the University of Washington suggested, “collaboration may actually be part of a continuum that runs: isolation, coordination, cooperation, then collaboration.” Whatever the final decision becomes regarding collaboration, it is important to note that for the purpose to be valid and the time well-spent, the process should always be driven by meeting student needs, not by educators or administrators who intend to push collaboration because it’s one of the buzzwords of education today.

If you’re interested in reading more about buzzwords in education, I recommend a visit to http://www.illinoisloop.org/buzzwords.html. The chart provides a humorous insight into the terms you might hear from teachers and administrators in your district.