our treatment (schoolife #3)

Schoolife

Schools often fail our students and families.  There are too many communities without strong, stable public schools, and there are too many classrooms that do not challenge, engage, and support our children and young adults.  We agree that outstanding teachers help prepare students to learn and grow.  We agree that prepared students learn core ideas and skills that lead to consistent achievement.  And we agree that excellent schools help promote innovative instruction and advanced student learning.

However, education reform is significantly more complicated and complex.  There is a wide range of variables that impact student readiness, teacher instruction, and school culture.  Different ideas and different pathways attract and engage students in different ways.  Yes, what happens in the classroom matters.  A lot.  But what happens outside the classroom can sometimes matter even more.

Schoolife documents the intersecting lives of teachers, students, and families inside and outside of school.  We will profile 1-2 6^th-8^th grade teachers and 3-5 6^th-8^th grade students over one school year.  The series will present the full life of students and teachers, including documentary footage, personal interviews, and background research.  We will produce the show in 30-minute long weekly episodes that show natural curves in our subjects’ lives.

Schoolife will track the influence of personal, professional, and social relationships on our subjects.  Each episode will advance developing storylines, including romantic interests, family dynamics, and classroom learning.  Families, students, and teachers live in very different ways.  How do our personal experiences and relationships influence our public lives in school?  And how do our schools influence how we live and learn outside of class?

Schoolife broadens and deepens our conversation on education reform, student learning, and school achievement.  We will show failure and success; hope and struggle; engagement and distraction.  Our goal is not to identify best practice or scalable reform.  Our goal is not to demonize or lionize any specific individual or idea.  Our only goal is to show a more full, more detailed, and more complex reality.  To show a more complete picture of student lives, student learning, and teacher instruction.  To show that our schools, like our lives, are full of challenge, conflict, and meaning.