Day 12 of #28daysofwriting and things are going well. Im enjoying it and I am finding inspiration in some funny places. Tonight's post is from one of these inspirations so please bear with me.
On the weekend our school had some potholes repaired with hot mix tar. It looked good. The carpark was smooth and looked much better than it did before. But today something odd happened.
It was a hot day and it must have soften the tar enough. Then someone parked on it. When they left it lifted the hot mix up and it even wrapped around their wheel. Stretching out like a giant black bit of chewing gum they had to cut it away to sort the mess it caused.
When we looked at the hole we could see that the pothole had not been prepped. The mix was just over loose gravel and dirt. It had nothing holding it together to the rest of the driveway. And that's when I realised that this was an analogy for schools.
Our job is to patch together pedagogy, resources, staffing, vision, ministry directives, community aspirations and personal goals into our school life. With all these things happening at once we have to be very careful to ensure that we have a prepared surface to bind our practice to.
In my experience there are a few things that are important in preparing a school to add on and make ‘repairs’ (read change) to their practice.
- A clear and well communicated need for the change: Andragogy(how adults learn) shows that adults learn best when there is a need. Without this it is too easy to dismiss the change as unnecessary and as an extra.
- Shared understanding of the direction: People need to understand what the change looks like, in education how often are teachers asked to implement programmes they have never seen in action? Programmes that are top down driven. The leaders may understand the system but if the people DOING the work don’t then they may miss the point. I liken this to the use of language experience in the classroom. It levels the playing field and gives everyone a shared understanding of the topic.
- Provide connections to current practice: Teachers have a lot to do. Another thing can sometimes be difficult to swallow. By providing links to the other practices in your school you are not only streamlining your system but you should be strengthening the areas of your schools practice.
- Provide leadership: This is a given. Things come unstuck when there is a disconnect between those who lead and those who do. This barrier should not exist and everyone should be see as being involved. A strong leader will provide the team with enthusiasm for the project and work through it with them. Focusing on results alone can damage the initiative when leaders miss the pitfalls teacher are experiencing along the way and push for things to happen faster.
- Resource the Initiative: If results are expected then the resources need to be in place. Just like providing teachers with a shared language and understanding is important, so to is giving them a shared set of tools. Overlooking resources indicates that the people who are actually DOING the work are being overlooked.
So avoid a hot mix mess at your school by thinking through what needs to be in place as you make changes. I have posted before that change can be scary and having strategies in place to manage the change stopping anyone getting their tyres caught up.
So thats my thoughts inspired by the hot mix mess at school today. There are probably many more aspects that I have missed but I hope you enjoyed my post. Let me know your thoughts.
This post relates the the following Registered Teacher Criteria
5. show leadership that contributes to effective teaching and learning
12. use critical inquiry and problem-solving effectively in their professional practice
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