Live from Japan!

All the schools in Japan have a very interesting phenomenon called Open Class Day (in some schools it is a whole week). Open Class Day happens several times a year in every Japanese school and it is a time when the school doors are open to the public, and the public can come in and go wherever, whenever, they please.

The teachers here are, not surprisingly, a bit nervous about Open Class Day. After all, there are parents, prospective parents, community members, and official board of education staff, roaming the hallways. These visitors walk around, stopping to watch and listen as teachers do their jobs, and the school goes about its normal, daily business.

I taught two classes on Open Class Day which gathered an audience. My first class had four or five people watching, although none of them were brave enough to actually enter my classrom. Instead, they huddled in the doorways and watched through the windows. During my second class, two people came into my classroom and sat through the entire thing. Several others walked past, watching parts of my lesson before moving on to other classrooms.

At first, it did make me nervous. But then, I really thought about why that was the case. After all, I have been teaching for quite a while now. I am comfortable and confident in the classroom, usually. My lesson was well-planned and the activity was good. I was prepared to engage the students and make them work hard. There was no reason to be nervous.

Also, there was a pretty good chance that most of the people watching wouldn’t speak much English anyway. It woudl be almost impossible for them to judge the merits of my lesson, when they weren’t able to understand it. But that’s beside the point.

Eventually, I started focusing less on the visitors and more on my students. After all, they are the ones I am truly working for. And I delivered the lesson as I would have if there wasn’t anyone else there. And, it went just fine.

Actually, I think that Open Class Day/Week is a remarkable idea. Unlike Open House in America, which generally takes place after school hours. Open Class Day gives schools an opportunity to show parents and other community members what the daily life of the school is like. It gives teachers an opportunity to show the parents and community how hard they work. What they do each and every day in their job.

The community can see, first hand, the quality of education that the students are receiving, the condition of the facilities, and the behavior of the students. Having a chance for the doors to be opened takes the mystery out of what happens inside the classroom each day. It helps parents understand what their students do in school, even if they ask their child each day what they did and the child says “nothing” in response.

Not only does Open Class Day take the mystery out of education (I have never understood why it is kept a mystery anyways), it is also a remarkable way to create accountability for all parties involved, without a lot of messy bureaucracy.

In America, when politicians and schools talk about getting more accountability into the system, they often propose logistically difficult means of creating and imposing accountability. (High stakes testing being one particularly wretched plan to create accountability, but that is a whole other rant) When, really, there are many more simple, cost-effective means of doing so. If we want teachers, and students, to be more accountable to the public, why not let the public in?

Holding an open class day/week wouldn’t simply create accountability for teachers. It would help create accountability for all parts of the education machine. Administrators would be held accountable for the condition of the building, the facilities that students and teachers inhabit each and everyday. Students would be accountable for their behavior. Teachers would be accountable for their teaching, their behavior management, and their professionalism.

Good schools, and good teachers, would have absolutely nothing to worry about. The schools that were not so good, on the other hand, would not fair quite as well. And perhaps that is a good thing.

I would imagine that if many schools had to open their doors to the public, I have some Chicago Public Schools in mind as I am writing this, many members of the public would be outraged if they saw what really happens, on an ordinary day, inside those buildings.

And perhaps, that outrage would lead to some sort of change. After all, change is what is needed to fix a system that is failing. And in the case of many American schools, the system is failing the students, the staff, and the community.