Five Things Learned from Pam Allyn

The most important voices, the crucial voices, the voices of children themselves, are most often left out when we speak of matters of education and best practice... Their perspective should be essential to how we think about education...I once asked a class of students to write what the secret message of their stories was, on a turned down corner of a page. And do you know what? Out of twenty children, seventeen wrote this word: "Love.”

"I was the shy child," a teacher said to me recently. "I was the child who never spoke up. Until I was thirteen, when a great teacher encouraged me and saw I had potential." This is a story worth telling... And while a good teacher cannot dictate the future, she can have a remarkably dramatic impact on all areas of her students’ future lives, including earnings, health and overall happiness.

If we can teach reading and writing and history and science through the lens of people’s own stories, we forge understandings that help us seal our trust in one another and make new commitments to improving the world. Education becomes the supreme tool we can give every child to best ensure that they improve this broken world and make it whole.

If you love to cook, there was perhaps a grandmother in your past who touched your hand as she helped you roll out the dough. And you loved that. If you love to read, there was someone who read to you, or at some point in your life, showed you what it felt like to fall through the pages of a book and into the story itself…We have to provide all children with the way to fall in love.

Share your ideas. Just want to give them away... to your colleagues, to your students, to the world.