The Larger, Smaller Conversation
[I posted this on LeaderTalk earlier today.]
I had a whole post ready for my “official” LeaderTalk day last Friday but in the end I just couldn’t bring myself to click “Publish.” I was a little frustrated when I wrote it and I think it needs to simmer for a bit before it’s ready for prime time.
Fast-forward to this morning and a great keynote from Karl Fisch about literacy in the 21st century. Karl said a lot of great things and challenged the thinking of a lot of people in the room. This led to some great conversations throughout the morning and throughout the day.
But Karl’s talk got me thinking about my “unpublished” post. I’ve been spinning a lot of half-formed thoughts around in my head all morning and this is my attempt at putting them together in some quasi-cohesive form.
Most of us reading LeaderTalk and publishing our blogs are basically in agreement that school, in its current iteration, leaves something to be desired in terms of its ability to meet the individual needs of students in a way that doesn’t look like an assembly line. Though the methods proposed to address this deficiency vary from blog to blog and person to person, there isn’t a lot of disagreement that something needs to change.
The question I’m left with, then, is that with all of this ideology around how things should look, and all these great conversations “out there,” how do we carry these conversations back to our schools? If we (the schools) are supposed to “be the change [we] want to see in the world,” then how do we start talking about this change at the micro level in one school?
More pointedly, how do we have a real discussion about these real ideas that doesn’t somehow degenerate into (a) “If the school/district would buy me a projector/computer/document camera, then I could do this stuff,” or (b) “Let’s talk about tardy policies and consequences for cell phone use…”?
Is this the majority of teachers? Probably not. Are these equipment and policy issues important? Sure. Are they the most important? Not to me.
Nonetheless, I would love to get beyond them in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m minimizing the concerns of the teachers for whom these are the Big Issues Of The School.
My struggle right now is trying to frame these big ideas in a simple, straightforward way that is accessible to everyone and doesn’t alienate any particular group of teachers. On the other hand, part of me feels like waiting around for buy-in from everyone means we’re wasting a lot of time when we could be moving ahead.
I guess don’t have a lot of answers, but I sure have a lot of questions.
June 30, 2009 at 08:44
We all have great ideas putting them in to place is much harder! As a principal blessed with the best staff in the universe, we’ve managed to make some great changes in our building. I’m a behaviorist, so I believe that in order to learn behavior must be under control first. That meant taking a look at how our kids actually come to us…we made the silly assumption that their parents and their years in elementary school actually taught them proper behavior. We were so wrong. Now we teach them exactly what we expect to see. It has had a tremendous impact on our school. My belief is that knowing how to behave will open up the avenue for learning and we will see better achievement. Now we can focus more attention on how and what we teach and how our students learn. I think we’ll really be making leaps and bounds soon!