The local yokels

In a forward to the Handbook of School Improvement (2010) by Blase, Blase, and Phillips our superintendent describes his difficult job: "Currently, I am superintendent of a small, fast-growing school district, which I am leading through significant improvement activities; this I do in a community and environment long committed to local traditions and provincial viewpoints that have been embedded and permeated the schools and community for generations." He discusses "teacher resistance to improvement activities requiring significant change" and praises the authors because " . . . the information in this book is presented in a usable format that will allow me to simplify and contextualize sophisticated concepts for neophyte leaders and non educators."

We may be unsophisticated country bumpkins but I think we know when we've been dissed.

Hunter apparently believes he is here in this provincial backwater to save us from ourselves. He should have read the other forward to the book by Susan Usry who notes that "the development of a school's system and its supporting subsystems [is] a bottom-up rather than top-down process" and that when administrators do all of the planning and simply pass it down the line to classrooms, "trust is abridged and ownership of improvement efforts is reduced."

If there are teachers reading this blog, I would like to ask you: Have you felt that your active participation in planning improvement activities was welcomed and encouraged? How much influence do you feel you have had over the process? How would you describe that process - bottom-up or top-down? Perhaps my impressions are mistaken but it seems that a good many of our problems have stemmed from a top-down management style and philosophy that was, from the beginning, disdainful of our teachers and schools.

There is always room for improvement and any teacher worth their salt is constantly evaluating his or her performance in the classroom and striving to do better. I know I spend a lot of time in conversation with my colleagues sharing ideas for student activities and discussing what does and does not work. What I know about effective teaching has emerged from those discussions and from honest, and sometimes painful, self-reflection. As a professional educator, I have been impressed with the teachers in our schools and I've even borrowed some ideas from them to use in the university classroom. They work very hard to develop interesting, integrated lesson plans than will stimulate student curiosity and enhance student engagement. They are light-years beyond the "skill and drill" teachers of my youth. We had a lot of good things going on in this district before the current superintendent arrived. Instead of dismissing our teachers (and our entire community) as recalcitrant and mediocre, why not build on what we have and truly improve our schools from the bottom up? There is apparently quite a body of educational research that supports just such an approach.