Getting Better

In the wake of our evaluation, I had no fewer than 8 conversations with teachers at my school, in which I was asked to provide reasons to continue working at our school. Such was the state of our malaise. It was difficult to decide what to tell these people. I have a great deal of faith in my school, and my colleagues, but I am not well suited to dealing with talk of abandoning ship.

Thankfully, this week things are starting to improve. We had a staff meeting yesterday, and spent the day today in "Professional Development" (which mostly boiled down to a discussion of implementing highernorder thinking), and for the first time in a long time we used distict mandated pd time to do something useful. We had the chance to discuss our teaching strategies, and to begin the process of working building more collaborative lessons. There were opportunities to feel validated, and to talk about what we do in our classrooms. For the most part, these meetings served the desired purpose of shifting the conversation away from how badly we did, and towards the improvement of instructional practices.

While progress was made in terms of our attitudes, time will tell whether or not this conversation translates into action. Much of the staff still feels as if the visitting committee did something to us, and if indeed we taught as well as we talked today, we would be a model school. more over there seems to be a substantial disconnect between the teachers who err on the side of accountability and those who err on the side of accommodation. Without some sort of reconciliation between the two sides, I fear our progress will stall.