A Nation Awakening Goodlad Notes

Goodlad, J. I. (1990). Teachers for our nation's schools. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Chapter 1: A Nation Awakening

·      "Educators must rethink what education is, what schools are for; and they must examine and rework the structures and practices that have always been out of sync for some students and are now revealed to be inappropriate for many (p. 2)."

·      "It is appropriate and sufficient to expect them to do this (educate) well. Yet so long as we fail to address today's critical problems through political action directed at economic and social restructuring, schools will continue to be burdened with inappropriate, excessive demands; to disappoint us; and to serve as scapegoats for our incompetence and inadequacies in both domestic and international arenas (p. 2)."

·      "...the education of teachers must be driven by a clear and careful conception of the educating we expect our schools to do, the conditions most conducive to this educating (as well as the conditions that get in the way), and the kinds of expectations that teachers must be prepared to meet (pp. 3-4)."

·      The renewal of schools, teachers, and programs do not happen independently. Renewal is simultaneous.

·      Toward the Loss of Innocence

Learnings and Stirrings

·      Despite the call for a revolution from the Nation at Risk report, the practices that followed were far from revolutionary.

·      Teacher education is in need of reform.

Agendas for Reform

·      The School System

·      Individual Schools

o   "Educating educators better and differently means that we must abandon the commonsense clichés of reform that inevitably prevail when we lack an understanding of what is wrong (p. 25)."

·      Teacher Education

o   "One of the learnings in these stirrings is that the education and training of teachers and principals must be closely tied to both the realities of schools and the conditions necessary to their substantial improvement (p. 27)."

Toward Understanding the Problems

·      Genesis of a Study

·      Lessons from a Reform Model

·      A Study of the Education of Educators

A Nation Ready?