Monday, August 13, 2007

School Reform

Today we had a discussion on our experiences with school reform. We honored our negative feelings and frustrations and we also found a what was positive about these schoolwide movements. Some of the frustrations were:
  • the amount of time and energy it takes to discuss and make changes
  • the emotional conflicts that occur as teachers feel their autonomy may be lost
  • the miscommunication that occurs between district, administrators, and departments relating to the reform and what is expected
  • having people feel like they can "opt" out of change

Positive discussions and results of school reform were also discussed:

  • brings new/fresh teaching ideas
  • creates focus for best practices
  • makes our teaching focus on student needs
  • creates relationships outside our own departments

None of these ideas were new, but it was good to feel that people had a place to voice a little dissent, while still realizing our impact on this change. We asked: in what way can we positively affect change and this was the response:

  • it is up to us, the teachers, to make this work
  • we all need to make a committment to change
  • we recognize that we need to keep each other accountable
  • we also recognized that we need expectations from the administrations, in terms of participation, long-term goals, etc.

We left the group thinking about our school vision and our CIT vision that we will create. Each person wrote down 3 words that they feel are key to creating a vision. We will discuss these ideas on Sept. 4th.

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Friday, August 10, 2007

Survey

Our school has committed to focusing on PLC's. Over the summer we read DuFour and Robert Eaker's book: Professional Learning Communities at Work. We are leading the discussion on Chapters 1-3 and our group has created a survey related to topics and beliefs from these chapters. Follow this link to complete the survey and we will discuss the results in "class":
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=xIhKYj0GS1OM0CrJJf7BaQ_3d_3d

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