As your building principal, I am implementing a change in regard to our monthly faculty meetings. In lieu of these meetings, I will now be requiring each department to meet so that faculty members can collaborate during this time. Careful, collective planning is bound to result in lessons that will produce far better assessment results (p.112 ). We need to communicate with each other to discuss effective teaching techniques. For instance, modeling and step-by-step demonstration of new skills is essential and should be addressed during your meetings. Colleagues should work together to come up with effective models to present to their students. This team approach hopefully will get you to see the big picture; that teamwork, not training, fosters continuous, targeted attention to the details and the impact of effective lessons and units (p.111 ).
This common planning time should allow teachers to collaboratively improve lessons and assessments-- which would have a direct and immediate impact on student learning (p.32 ).
With this change in procedure that I am instituting, I am looking for exceptional leadership, teaming, clear standards, and accountability. In combination, these factors guarantee that any school will make rapid, substantial improvement (p.45 ).
I believe that working together as professionals we can collaborate between veteran teachers and novice teachers. We should be able to incorporate the experience of the veteran teachers combined with the latest techniques and strategies that novices coming out of college can share. " If we leave virtually every instructional choice up to individual teachers who work alone, then inferior practices will dominate most schools." ( Haycook, 2005)
We must remember that as the needs of our students change, we as educators must be able and willing to change in order to be effective.
Respectfully,
Lawrence J. Manning
I like your idea of scrapping the faculty meeting (which is generally just one-way conversation) in favor of planning time for departments. How do you make the end of the day productive, however?
ReplyDeleteDr. Bachenheimer,
ReplyDeleteI propose to institute a late start day where the students begin class at 10:00. The teachers will sign in at the regular time and report to their teams to work on common planning and assessments. The early meeting time should facilitate positive results. This late start day would be held once a month.
Great idea! Good thinking out of the box.
ReplyDeletePrincipal Manning,
ReplyDeleteI understand that you would like us to meet together to improve our lessons and assessments for the students but I do not feel that this time will be productive. Who will lead our group discussion? Who is to say that one idea is better than another when trying to come up with a lesson plan. I have been teaching her for 25 years and every new principal wants us to work together and share ideas. Every year we get a new hot shot teacher coming out of college with new teaching ideas that we "have to try". What about the methods that I have been using for the past 25 years, they seemed to have worked! I am sure that this time can be used for something more productive like grading the assessments we already use.
Mr. McBurney