"All is connected...no one thing can change by itself." Paul Hawken ("Natural Capitalism", YOGA Journal 10/94)
I think this explains a lot of the reactions to change. When I taught high school, our district was infamous for finding a new program, and jumping into it full force, wanting the faculty to support the idea totally.
One program in particular comes to mind. We were told that all children are capable of becoming brain surgeons and that we should teach to all this way. Ok...if the distract hadn't taken this so literally, perhaps the concept would have had some chance in hell of succeeding.
A test group of teachers across the board was formed. I was one of the Oldies choosen from my school and department. Guess they thought if an old broad can learn and accept this stuff, it will fly anywhere. Ha! The premise was that we should all change our curriculum and lesson plans to teach to the upper 1/3 of the class and that the rest would, as they put it, "catch up". Now, most of these "they" people hadn't been in a classroom in ten years and the impracticality or the fall out of all of us actually teaching like this had totally escaped the powers that be.
If you bought into the concept and agreed to impliment it (and this was after a half day training, right?), you were free to go. The schoold district also decided not to get the teacher workbooks that the classes were to be designed from but we were told we were bright and could figure it out. Those of us who did not catch on right away...and that would be yours truely, had to return for another session and still a 3rd. Finally, I got it...without us, they could not impliment the change. The last group of us, nodded, said we'd do whatever the plan was and never heard of the program again.
Makes ya wonder. It's all connected but sometime some of the dots are missing, ya know?
1 comment:
LOL, as a former teacher, I can so relate! That's one of the reasons I am a former and not a current teacher.
Thanks as always for visiting my post.
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