As administrators, we’re great at manipulating time and space. We think about and make improvements to schedules, facilities, class size, procedures, sequences, requirements, and course offerings. Well, most of us do all of that, the best administrators are always analyzing, researching, reflecting and planning. The worst do little to effect any change at all.
And you know what? It’s all for nothing if we don’t invest in our teachers and our own analysis of what we teach and how we teach it. Every single year that I work in education, I’m more convinced that we’ve never done enough to foster a different system, one in which teachers collaborate on what they’re teaching and how they’re doing it.
Our teachers are still largely left to figure everything out on their own which is the very reason they take it so personally when we try to analyze what they’re doing, when and how. They don’t feel like we were all invested in the first place, instead they can feel like, “hey, this is what I did and I got there alone, NOW you want to come in and question how I did it?” If we’d ever talked to them about what that should look like in the first place maybe they wouldn’t feel personally attacked when we start to say “let’s look at that, what went right and wrong there?”
Let’s change this. My biggest fear right now is that all of our work together this summer, analyzing results and standards to determine what we want to teach and when will become another isolated experience where teachers just end up mapping what they already do. That won’t matter much. As T. Gray says, “that’s just an exercise in compliance.” Does anyone get that we’re better working together than we are alone? That it isn’t who’s the best or most liked teacher that matters? That we have so much to learn from one another and that analyzing and discussing and planning our K-12 curriculum is the most meaningful improvement we can make?
What we teach and how–that’s it. The rest is gravy.
And I haven’t even gotten to how we’re investing in teacher learning of instructional practices through Thoughtful Education yet. . .
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“Our teachers are still largely left to figure everything out on their own which is the very reason they take it so personally when we try to analyze what they’re doing, when and how. They don’t feel like we were all invested in the first place, instead they can feel like, “hey, this is what I did and I got there alone, NOW you want to come in and question how I did it?” If we’d ever talked to them about what that should look like in the first place maybe they wouldn’t feel personally attacked when we start to say ‘let’s look at that, what went right and wrong there?'”
I’m with you, Kimberly. Professional development means teaching to a parade that is constantly passing, not a discrete “class” here and there on the edu-fad d’jour. And we need time to work together. A lot of time.
Thirty-five years of research tells us that we know what to do for kids. Let’s do it. 🙂