Improving schools
I had an “ah ha” moment last week at the NMSA annual conference in Houston, Texas. I had the opportunity to hear Rick DuFour keynote the opening session and he spoke of how we have tried for many years to improve schools - one teacher at a time. His description of the formal clinical supervision process brought back memories for me from both from my teaching and early administrative days – a pre-conference to discuss objective and strategies, a three day cycle of observing the same class while taking meticulous verbatim data, a post-conference to review the results, followed up by a written report that documented the whole process. As a teacher, I never felt living through this lengthy, time-consuming process helped improve my skills to any great degree, nor as an administrator did I feel it made a significant difference in the teaching of those I observed – especially those teachers who could make teaching look effortless! Dr. DuFour then remarked how much more effective it would have been to instead spend those numerous hours helping a group of teachers learn to work together to improve their teaching by focusing on what was being learned rather than what was being taught.
As I reflected back over the years, I realized he was right - that the greatest payoffs in student achievement and school improvement did not come from observing teachers, but rather had occurred from spending time with a group of teachers, collectively focusing on what our students were learning (or not learning). One of the core areas from the Breaking Ranks in the Middle framework for school improvement is collaborative leadership and professional learning communities – if we truly want to effect long lasting improvement in our schools, we must build this collaboration into the school culture. So ask yourself the question - Are you spending the majority of your time trying to improve your school one teacher at a time or by modeling a more collaborative process?
