At our school's Professional Development Day, er, festivities, I kept coming back to one of this chapter's points about the necessity of teacher buy-in and ownership. As mentioned before, JFKHS is trying its best to implement standards- and researched-based best practices among all its teachers. Granted, it's a lot of work to 1) sit through regular meetings to learn about different literacy-aimed learning activities, 2) try them out with your students, and 3) reflect and report on the efficacy of a chosen lesson. I think our biggest obstacle has been maintaining teacher participation. It's one thing to support the improvement of the literacy skills of all students, but, as this quote explains, it starts with all teachers working together.
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As was mentioned in Chapter 5, there must be teacher engagement and teacher ownership if an improvement program is to happen. As long as we have teachers in the system who have not bought into the value of the change process, it will be very hard to make the change happen. How frustrating is that?
ReplyDeleteWere we in the same staff development? Even though we had an agenda, time and presenters, we had such a long dicussion of our vision statement, because some teachers didn't "buy" into what the majority beleived that the students would benefit from,in the end we voted and the majority won! Now if we could just have the same outcome for our school curriculum, that with be awesome!
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