As I read this chapter, I really began to connect it to the changes that have been going on in my school for the past 8 years that I have been there. I suppose I should begin with the fact that the school that I work at is considered a low performing urban school that ranks in at the fourth from the bottom of the barrel position in my very large urban district. Ever since I have worked there, we have averaged between 1100-2300 students. I have been under the regime of four different principals and too many vice principals to count. My school last year was put on the states persistently dangerous schools probation list and discipline has always been an issue. That said, I would like to go on record and say that I work with some of the most amazing teachers, who are truly dedicated to the students that we teach. Most of us love our students and want to be there everyday to make sure that we are giving them the best education possible. I teach some gifted and talented students that will go far in life once they have had to opportunity to get through high school and go to college. I feel that the school itself has gotten a bad rap from the few students that we have that are not willing to look far into their futures and see how their actions now are effecting themselves and their peers.
That said, the reading talks about two types of change, piecemeal and systematic. Up until this past year, I have seen piecemeal changes occurring in my school. A principal would come in and initiate all of these changes here and there without ever really getting results. There would be little to no staff by in and nothing was ever seen through to the end. An example of this was when one of our former principals came into the school on our first teacher workday back and announced that “We are going to only focus on the academics.” When a question was posed to her about discipline, again I teach at a school where discipline has been an ongoing issue, she replied with a smile on her face, “We are going to only focus on academics, the rest will follow.” As the year progressed she introduced us to an academic program called Leaning Focused. Teachers at first were excited to have PD that was going to help them engage students better in the classroom and produce better learners. She delivered the PD’s herself in a deadpan monotone voice that had most of us teachers looking to our cell phones with text messaging capabilities for solace. I want to go on record as saying it was one of the worst PD’s I have been to in my life. I will also go on record as saying that her approach to the “change” the school needed, turned me off so badly that I refused to teach the Learning Focused way. I have since realized that it is an effective and systematic way to teach. Her piecemeal attempt at change did nothing to change the culture of our school. The one thing that way accomplished was to enact a school uniform policy to help with issues of safety. That was not even followed through on. In September of last year we had yet another new principal grace our doorstep. Jaded by past principals and there lack of ability to lead us into change, we reverted back into our old ways and battled the same complaints from years past. After observing the staff and students for a few months, our new principal sent out an email that has turned our school upside down. He formed a team, which he nicknamed The Team, of 9 teachers, myself included, and we set about a task to transform our school. Ecological systematic change was occurring and I did not even realize that there was a systematic method to his madness, until I read Chapter 21. I began reading about the Step-Up-To-Excellence (SUTE) process and found myself nodding my head and thinking to myself, we did that and we are doing this! The Team and the administrators at my school began with completely redesigning the school based off of the research that we did at schools that were high performing and had similar characteristics to ours. Why were they succeeding and not us? We then began the process of putting together what we wanted our school be and to do. You could follow along with the SUTE process and step by step go through what we did and are doing now to make our school successful. The changes have been amazing so far and I look forward to seeing the results.
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