Certification changes teachers, students, classrooms

(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

NORMAL — Illinois State University’s College of Education and the student organization Urban Needs In Teacher Education (UNITE) will sponsor a public screening of the documentary movie Mitchell 20: Teacher Quality is the Answer on Monday, Feb. 6.

The film depicts the story of 20 teachers of a school in a low-income, largely Hispanic area of Arizona. Spanning three years, the documentary uncovers a broken educational system that works against the very teachers who commit to investing time and effort to reach the highest level of excellence.

According to documentary Codirector Andrew James Benson, “By challenging themselves, the staff take a collective pledge to earn national board certification in order to pull their students out of the depths of poverty, and help them chart a bright future.”

Click below to listen to ISU Assistant Prof. Brian Horn and University High School English teacher Diane Walker discuss the movie’s themes on WJBC:

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“We teach our college students when they’re training to become teachers that one-size-fits-all assessment is not the way to assess student performance or learning,” Walker said. “It can be one indicator, but the frustration is that on one day a group of student in one place and one time taking the same type of test is used to show the same type of assessment for each student.”

Horn said he saw the documentary as an answer to the much-debated documentary Waiting for Superman.  That movie attacked teachers’ unions and tenure, blaming them for the lack of high quality education in U.S.

“Unions are not in charge of teacher recruitment or hiring or professional development,” Horn said. “Certainly (unions) are a factor, but we need to consider the bureaucracy of the school system and how they empower us or don’t. Do we have in place the opportunity for teachers to work together to meet the specific needs of students or broad universalized standards of practice that may not fit the particular needs of our kids?”

The public is invited to see the movie at 6:30 p.m. on Monday in the Brown Ballroom of the Bone Student Center. The screening is free. For additional information, contact the College of Education at (309) 438-5415 or email education@IllinoisState.edu.

Beth Whisman can be reached at whisman@wjbc.com.