Adminfo - and Vice Principals

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Schools need to ensure that students are learning deeply and are becoming thoughtful citizens who are valued. As a new principal, this resonates with me. I want to be sure that when decisions for my school are made, they develop from best practices and I am able to provide solid evidence to support the tacit knowledge experienced educators possess. “work” was “done.” I would answer yes, but in truth I was lying: the work of an educator is never done. I did not want my mother to worry or to think I was a bad teacher, but I knew I would have to eventually find a way to resolve the conflict I was having about being untruthful. To compound my dilemma, my training had led me to believe that there would be a lot of hard work in my first few years as a teacher, but then it would be easier because my work would be already prepared. The theory was that as I approached five years of teaching it would become a nine-to-three job, unless there was a staff meeting. As I passed my fifth year and there was still always more work that could be done, I began to understand that this initial and narrow view of education was inaccurate. I needed to explain the idea of learning being a process and not a product to my mother so that I could not only be truthful to her, but also to myself. This realization allowed me to be comfortable with the fact that to grow as a teacher my paradigm for teaching had to shift. I could now give myself permission to let tough concepts both for my students, and for myself, time to marinate. The fundamental yet simple cooking principle of taking an unappetizing piece of meat adding some spice and the most important ingredient, time, has implications in education. Education and cuisine both require an appropriate set of circumstances so that the “toughness” can be mellowed and the once unpalatable can be appreciated. “Powerful Leadership is distributed February 08 • Adminfo • 10 because the work of instructional improvement is distributed,” Elmore wrote. When all stakeholders in the educational system are contributing to ensure learning takes place, great things happen. A core value from the formal and informal leaders with which I have worked comes from the idea that there is a synergy when we come together: many minds are better than one, and that many hands make light work. In education, it is important that our work is actualized in a thoughtful and smart way so that it can be sustained over time. As a formal leader in the school, I encourage teachers to utilize the strengths and talents of themselves and other staff. We work together to share classes with each other so students will receive instruction in art and physical education from the most qualified and talented teachers in these areas. To continue on the theme of distributed leadership, we can use the knowledge base for performance standards that we already have as a staff and look at how we can start to incorporate more formative assessment into our practice. Elmore’s article articulates various problems with the NCLB policy, but there appears to be some unanswered questions. There is still much investigation educators must undertake to better understand the learning process themselves, but where is the moral accountability of the politicians to become informed of the true issues in education I wonder what can be done to measure both internally and externally a school’s growth during a time of improving practice. How you measure this growth is especially important when trying to decide if a school has reached a temporary plateau, or is “cruising” and on the verge of “sinking.” Rhonda Togyi is principal at Fort Fraser Elementary in the Nechako Lakes School District. She wrote this paper as part of her requirements for her ED-D532 course at the University of Victoria (Faculty of Education, Certificate in School Management and Leadership). This is her first article for Adminfo. She can be reached at rtogyi@mail.sd91.bc.ca Our cartoonist is Rod Maclean, a former Surrey principal. For a weekly cartoon email Rod at ramaclean@shaw.ca
Good news/early childhood research Preparing early The StrongStart program in Nechako Lakes builds language, social skills and emotional development in kids before they enrol in kindergarten by Leslie Dyson Countless studies, proposals, committee sessions, workshops and meetings have been held over many decades to come up with programs and strategies to help at-risk children experience success in school. Many educators in B.C. believe the Education Ministry’s StrongStart BC Program has features that will finally bring these children onto a level playing field when they start kindergarten. These free drop-in programs for all children from 0 to 5, running at least three hours a day and five days a week, are led by qualified early childhood educators. The programs are housed in unused classrooms and give parents and caregivers new ways to support their children’s learning and connect with others. The goals are linguistic, physical and social development. Michelle Miller-Gauthier, literacy coordinator for the Nechako Lake school district and a principal for 10 years, said, “If we can provide intervention opportunities at an earlier time and help parents know what’s important to keep doing, the better it is for the children.” Language skills play a large role in students’ success in school and society, she said. “We know from the Betty Hart research that language development windows start to close at age three.” February 08 • Adminfo • 11 Early-childhood researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley found that children are greatly affected by the number of words they are exposed to by their parents. In a child’s first four years, the average child from an economically advantaged family can hear nearly 45 million words spoken to them. The average child from a family living in poverty is just 13 million. That means impoverished children start school with a tremendous defi-
Page 1 and 2: Adminfo February 2008 Volume 20 •
Page 3 and 4: We run the risk of having a particu
Page 5 and 6: scoff at any mention that it would
Page 7 and 8: VCR, but then, who needs it. I can
Page 9: Learning/The unending process Utili
Page 13 and 14: will become bored because they’ll
Page 15 and 16: hilaration again, the same dedicate
Page 17 and 18: have begun to place real value on t
Page 19 and 20: Enhancing every child’s life chan

Adminfo - and Vice Principals

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?