What You Will See Happen...
2. Examining Education Issues and Ideas with Colleagues
Dialogue with colleagues is critical to establishing an environment that supports long-term school and classroom improvement. As teachers engage in an interchange of ideas, they begin to examine their own practice and their assumptions about teaching, deepen their collective understanding, and develop support systems that encourage continual inquiry. They become more thoughtful about their practice and the strategies that they use to help students learn.
The Eastway Middle School principal noticed that for the last two years the percentage of students failing eighth grade had increased each year. He asked teacher volunteers to participate in a study group to look at this problem. While he planned to attend meetings periodically, he asked the group members to determine their own leadership responsibilities and come to him when they needed administrative advice. As the teachers began their dialogue about the declining pass rate, they said:
As an administrator, you can create and encourage opportunities for teachers to talk reflectively.
1. Ask department and grade level lead teachers to conduct dialogue events once a month on topics of interest to the teachers.
2. Create mentoring or peer coaching teams for all teachers, not just new teachers, and establish regular meeting times to talk about issues of instructional concern. Bring multiple teams together occasionally to dialogue across teams.
I teach them the material; they just don’t care enough to learn it.
I spend so much time reteaching material that they haven’t mastered that I just don’t have time to teach them all they need to know.
They are more interested in sports and TV than they are in passing.
There is so much to teach them. I am supposed to follow the textbook, prepare them for the state test and follow our local curriculum. There just isn’t time.
As they continued to talk about these concerns, they found that they shared common frustrations, and they also felt they "had tried everything." One of the teachers began to talk about why she had become a teacher in the first place. She thought she would be helping students to learn, to be successful in their futures.
As the conversation continued over the next few weeks, the teachers began to realize that in their rush to "do the right things" their students’ needs had been left out of the process. As teachers, they were more focused on following guidelines and mandates than they were on ensuring that students were learning. They had become so focused on the chores of teaching that they had lost the joy of teaching. Their students also seemed to have lost the joy of learning.
They invited the principal to their next meeting to share their first major discovery—to recapture their passion for teaching, they had to refocus their attention on their students’ needs.
While this discovery does not solve the school’s failure problem, it is a first step in the process of seeking solutions. These teachers realized that they had to look at their actions and attitudes, not just what was wrong with the students. When educators are able to do this, they experience a personal renewal that motivates them to probe deeper into the conflicts and tensions in their education practice. Through this process, teachers are able to make sense of the situations by building a common language and understanding of the nature of the problem. The teaching passion, renewed conviction, and new understandings developed by the group make the reflective process a powerful strategy for improving classroom practice.
Next page: Making Thoughtful Choices to Improve Student Learning
