Governor’s Forums on Education Reform

Governor’s Education Forum –Columbus, Ohio

Remarks and observations by Jodi Palmer:

“In my opinion, the governor was very interested in receiving feedback from educators about how “they see”  educational reform.  He was focused on what we wanted the education of our students to look like within his 6 principles.  He seemed to be genuinely interested in receiving innovative ideas to help guide him towards the creation of his educational reform proposal.

He began by presenting his mission:
“…to ensure that every child has the opportunity to succeed…..to be a well-round person …..creativity, innovation, and global knowledge” (sorry, but I didn’t get all the exact words, just the one’s I felt were important!)

The format was a presentation of the mission and 6 principles, then a feedback session, presentation of “what-ifs”,  feedback session.

 After the governor’s forum, we met in small groups to discuss what individual reform items we would like to see happen.  Then we came up with “The BIG three” items that our group felt strongly about, and then we were asked to choose one of those three to share out to the large group.  During the large group sharing, most of the “one big idea” were rewritten to include all of the three ideas the group felt were important.  Good idea to have a language arts person in your group! Ha, ha!

Anyway, during the large group sharing, I believe that of the 10-12 groups, over half presented something that was either directly related to health and physical education or implied it.  I was very excited!   We were then asked as a large group to narrow to 4 BIG ideas to take to the governor.  They were:
-personalized instruction
-community/parental involvement in the schools
-appropriate assessments
-better teacher preparedness
-healthy kids!!”