CARE teaches teachers active learning

by Jen Strawn
For The Post

When students think back to a favorite elementary school teacher, most often what comes to mind is not the life-altering lectures. Students remember teachers for their ability to involve them in active learning.

Programs such as Creating Active Reflective Educators for Democratic Education, or CARE, aim to teach education students how to go beyond a prepackaged curriculum and engage their students in active learning.

CARE is a pre-service teacher preparation program that models and demonstrates democratic teaching methods. CARE coordinator Rosalie Romano said the program is not just about curriculum or instruction but about how teachers treat their students.

“It’s how they model values such as respect and how they teach their students meaningful values,” Romano said. “By the end of the program it is likely that a teacher will have over 1,000 classroom hours, including student teaching.”

The CARE program, which prepares students in Ohio University’s college education for teaching, is a comprehensive three-year program organized in 1987 out of the Institute for Democracy in Education.

Jaylynne Hutchinson, director of the IDE, said a group of teachers founded the institute after they felt they were not given the freedom to teach in a way that would best help their students. CARE then naturally formed from the IDE.

“If we want to see progressive and democratic education grow in schools, that means we should prepare our teachers to be democratic educators,” Hutchinson said. “We should get them before they get out to the schools, and we should give them opportunities to learn about democratic education prior to becoming a teacher in their field.”

The democratic teaching methods CARE emphasizes do not have one set definition, Hutchinson said. Primarily, democratic education should provide three basic outcomes or understandings.

CARE teaches prospective teachers to help students understand they have the power to change their world, that they should know how to change their world and that they should care enough to change their world.

“Oftentimes we teach kids about the social issues in the world, but we don’t ever teach them the process and the skills by which they can actually go out there and make a difference in their world,” Hutchinson said.

As a part of part of the program, during the Spring Quarter of their junior year, OU education students in CARE participate in a service learning expedition that puts democratic education into practice, Romano said.

The class, which Romano teaches, puts CARE students into a classroom setting where they actually become the teachers. The CARE students break up a class of elementary or middle school students into small groups headed by a CARE student. The small groups research, learn about and develop a public presentation around social issue.

Robert Maher, a fourth-grade teacher at Amesville Elementary, said he was interested in the service learning expedition because he knew the program was successful. Through the project he hopes his students will become self-directed learners.

“Our students learn a lot of academics and skills at the same time,” Maher said. “The project makes them more socially aware locally, nationally and even internationally.”

Romano said the service learning expedition is only one example of how CARE prepares its education students to cultivate civic-minded students in the classroom.

“CARE stands against the notion that all teaching is, is stand and deliver,” she said. “When remembering a favorite teacher, the subject they taught doesn’t come up. It’s the teacher. That’s why teaching is a moral endeavor. It is about human relationships, cultivating human beings to touch the lives human beings in order that they may grow to their greatest capacity.”