Smart & Good High Schools - The Flippen Group

CHAPTER 4: The Professional Ethical Learning Communityof character and by the long-term goals of excellence andethics in school, work, and beyond.PELC 6: Grapple with the tough issues.Promising Practice 1:6.1 Grapple with educational policyPELC issues impacting teaching andlearning; create the conditions thatmaximize support for authenticschool reform.In order to create the PELC, schools must confront a brutalfact: educational policy issues are macro forces thatdirectly impact the quest for excellence and ethics.School size, teacher course load, teacher-student ratio,per-pupil expenditures, authentic assessment of studentmastery—these are often the elephants in the livingroom. Everybody knows that these issues deeply affecteverything schools do, yet we often ignore them and lookinstead for “silver-bullet” practices or programs that willsucceed in spite of the missing preconditions for success.Our failure to adequately address these preconditionsseriously inhibits the pursuit of excellence and ethics.The PELC must therefore grapple with issues such as:✔ How much planning time is necessary to implementthe practices we need to develop performance characterand moral character?✔ Where will that time come from?✔ What is the role of school size in our quest to developperformance character and moral character? Whatabout class size?✔ What are optimal teaching loads if we expect faculty tocultivate significant relationships with students?✔ What are the real dollars required to train faculty andstaff so they can implement new practices?PELC members must persevereand have a “can do” attitude.The high school reform literature—see, for example,NASSP’s Breaking Ranks II—has devoted much attentionto issues like these. A given school may or may not agreewith, or be able to fully implement, all of the NASSP recommendationsfor optimal solutions. Every school, however,must at least grapple with such issues if it wants tofully realize its potential for excellence and ethics.PELC members must also have a “can do” attitude and acommitment to persevere for as long as it takes to createthe conditions that support the collaborative pursuit ofexcellence and ethics. As one teacher, chair of his historydepartment, told us, “Trying to figure it out just takesrolling up your sleeves and then not giving up.” Hedescribed his faculty’s determined effort to find a time,during the school day, for weekly teacher collaboration,now a signature practice of his school and a linchpin ofits success.We went to the school board and said, “This [teacher collaboration]is something we would like to do.” They said,“We’re all for it—do whatever you want, but don’t spendany more money, don’t change the school day, and youcan’t alter the bus schedule.” We were on an 8-hour day—from 7:45 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. Classes started at 8:05 andwent to 3:25. Teachers stayed 20 minutes before and 20minutes after to help kids or to fulfill their administrativeresponsibilities.It was actually our teachers’ union that came to us andsaid, “We’ve got the solution. On the first day of the week,we will come in 15 minutes early—7:30 a.m.—and leave at3:30, so it’s still an 8-hour day. Faculty can meet from7:30 to 8:15, and we’ll just push back the start of school20 minutes until 8:25. We sacrifice 20 minutes of instructionaltime on Monday, but we pick up 45 minutes of collaborativework every week for our teams.”“Our teachers’ union came to us andsaid, ‘We’ve got the solution.’”This plan, the teacher said, has worked amazingly well forhis school. “We still have the same number of kids in thebuilding. We just opened up early: The gyms, the library,the resource room, the computer labs—they’re all open.And in five years, we’ve never had a major disciplineproblem.”Some educators have said to us, regarding a given ideafor school reform, “Unions wouldn’t support that.”Indeed, in many schools, the union may be part of theproblem rather than part of the solution. But as theabove story shows, a union can take a very constructiverole in helping to create the PELC.If critical issues such as time for faculty collaboration gounconsidered and unchanged, the institutional verbiageabout school reform and excellence and ethics can feel,in the words of one veteran high school reformer, like a“cruel joke.” However, if the educational policies that81Smart & Good High Schools