EdPsych 490TER: Dr. Sandy Levin
Marty Sierra-Perry
Week One: Leadership Changes
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EdPsych 490TER: Dr. Sandy Levin Marty Sierra-Perry Week One: Leadership Changes |
Reflections on assigned readings:
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NEW VISION |
A New Vision for Staff Development, Dennis Sparks and Stephanie Hirsh
"In times of change learners inherit the earth while the learned are perfectly prepared for a world that no longer exists." -- Eric Hoffer
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The Ilinois Learning Standards with its emphasis on "what students know and are able to do as a result of their learning "requires teachers to teach with the end in sight. Doing so requires reflection about the benefits of this assignment, activity, selection, project,or test will contribute to the students ability to successfully convey their meeting of the standrds through benchmarks.
In my teaching situation, results-driven education is clashing with the traditional view of "seat time" as the determiner of student student's meeting benchmarks for learning and as result , receiving credit for a course. While I may be focusing on the students' performance in a course, counselors are "content" that a student receives a passing grade and thus credit for the course and moves closer to graduation. The student may still have gaps in his achievement ,but those gaps are not brought into consideration in evaluating whether the student should go to the next class.
The same could be said of the manner in which staff development occurs. With the recent staff development in diversity, we were required to sign in and stay until 3:30 p.m. During the presentation, some teachers were grading papers, others carried on private conversations, and still others were reading "stuff." Despite the varying levels of engagement, the assumption at the end of the staff development is that we all have had diversity training, and we have all understood how to move what was presented into our classrooms. We all met the attendance requirement, even if the session went over 3:30 p.m. and some did not return from the break.
A family had an orchard that was quite successful. During a severe summer storm, lightning struck the adjoining farm . A fire was ignited and the farm and pasture that butted up against the orchard were destroyed. Understandly, the family was relieved that the fire had not spread to their orchard and ruined the crop. However, as the season progressed, they noticed that the orchard was not producing as much fruit. They attempted many solutions--new fertilizer, more water, fresh soil--but nothing helped. Finally, one of the workers remarked that it was so quiet in the orchards that it was almost scary. Where were the bees? Indeed the bees that had created hives in the pasture had been destroyed during the fire. Who would pollinate the trees? So, even though the owners of the orchard had escaped the initial effects of the fire, in the long run, their orchard was in danger of being destroyed as well. The interdependence of the bees and the trees had been forgotten. Systems thinking would have alerted the family to this scenario sooner.
Recently, our administration decided to remove our lowest track. This began with the ninth grade class. Each year another class would be phased out. The rationale was not explicitly stated, but we in the English department understood the decision to be driven by the Office of Civil Rights agreement. The students who made up the lower track were predominately minority students. To address the situation, all lower tracked English students would be placed in the middle level track. However, at the time there was no consideration of the effect that this change would have on curriculum and instruction. Previously, the lowest track had co-taught classes. Would this be the scenario in the future? What about the ninth grade co-taught students? Would they go back to a lower track class their sophomore year? They had received a credit for the midlevel English class, though they had not "covered " all the works. They had, however, covered many of the benchmarks for early high school as described in the Illinois Learning Standards document. Rather than have students return to a lower track their sophomore year, the department decided to eliminate all the lower track English classes. Then it was decided that there would be co-taught midlevel classes at each grade level. So, while all the students will be placed in the middle level track or the advanced track, some students will be in co-taught middle level classes. So, have we eliminated tracking?
This is a situation that would have been well-served by systems thinking. Teachers were not fighting a "change"; they just wanted it to be informed change. A systems thinking approach to this dilemna would have forced the question to be "What structures need to be in place to create more equitable opportunities for student learning?" rather than "How do we get rid of the perception that low-track classes have a majority of the minority students enrolled?"
The diversity staff development would have been very different if it had been organized around the systems thinking question.
According to the article, "Contstructivists believe that learners create their own knowledge structure rather than merely receive them from others." If we view learners as Catherine Twomey Fosnot suggests as "thinker, creator, and constructor," we would see teachers and their learning in the same way. Rather than inoculating them in how -to- workshops for quick fixes, we would develop professional development opportunities that provide teachers to "learn in constructivist settings and construct for themselves educational visions through which they can reflect on educational practices" (Brooks and Brooks).
I have had the opportunity to do just that this past year with seven other teachers of English through the National Council of Teacher's Reading Initiative. As I read through the section on "Major Shifts in Staff Development," I found myself recognizing many of them inherent in the Reading Initiative. The Reading Initiative is school-focused. The school with its administrator and teachers make a commitment to each other as they begin their inquiry in reading process and ways to make reading instruction meaningful and useful in their specific situation. Briefly, the Reading Initiative is
"a three-year commitment to a proces that produces a kind of recurring rhythm: patterns of questioning, experimenting, observing, reading, talking, reflecting, and refining theory and practice ebb and flow to form a pattern that defines individual school teams. When teachers enter the NCTE Reading Initative, they are clear on their responsibilities to it and to one another. While the responsibilities are weighty, the professional payoff is enormous. The opportunty to think and talk and look deeply into a complex teaching issue is something that most teachers crave throughout their professional lives.Participants will be asked to take on multiple professional issues simultaneously, including reading professional literature, crutinizing their own practice and its impact on student sucess, trying new approaches to teaching, communicating openly with colleagues and school administrators about their students and their teaching practices, and mentoring other teachers." (NCTE Reading Intitiative Consultant Handbook)
Our group will continue next year focusing on Critical Literacy, Content-Area Reading, and Learning to Inquire. We will mentor a new level one Reading Initiative group next fall. I have read the final reflections of most of the participants this year who rave about the collegiality that the Reading Initiative has created.
This experience is expensive, but the participants report that the strategies we learn and practice have had positive effects on student achievement.
Many elementary teachers may wonder at becoming so excited about teaching reading, but as secondary English teachers our instruction in teaching reading is usually one course, so we are more literature teachers than reading teachers. The Reading Initiative has caused us to look at ourselves as literacy teachers. We meet for two hours every month (except December), and every other week during one of our lunch periods. The commitment at the meetings to address our questions, to discover our own answers, and raise new questions has kept us from letting the "stuff" of school get us down.
Most of us have participated in curriuclum writing this summer to address the change in our tracking system and to develop a coherent writing curriculum. The effects of the Reading Initiative have carried over into our dealing with other colleagues and have made this experience worthwhile.