The American Proverb, “Don’t judge a man, until you’ve
walked a mile in his boots,” proved very powerful for me this past week. I wasn’t judging anyone of course,
however, I was asking a lot of my teachers regarding the implementation of our
new Reading and Language Arts curriculum.
I was asking for “implementation with fidelity” without being able to
fully empathize with their perspectives.
I found that I truly wasn’t providing the instructional leadership that
I desire as a principal. I
found that many of the challenges that I was hearing were consistent across
each grade level. I decided that
the limits that I was unintentionally placing on myself as an instructional
leader were going to be days of the past.
I encouraged (and begged), a fifth grade teacher to allow me to fully
plan and implement a weeks worth of our new English and Language Arts
curriculum materials. I will
forever be grateful to this teacher for her willingness to allow me to take on
this challenge. It is not an easy
thing, to hand your classroom over to someone else. I made sure that she understood that this was for me, and
that I was not a “model” of implementation. My goal was to fully immerse myself in the new
materials so that I could fully empathize with time constraints and full
implementation. I was excited and
nervous, but anticipated the experience ahead!
After my first Friday of planning from 5:00 PM to 10:30 PM,
I immediately realized, that this was going to be a powerful week! To say that I benefited from this
experience would be an incredible understatement! This was the most powerful learning I have ever personally
endured. Those 20 students taught
me more this week, than I could have learned in a month’s worth of formal
professional development! Again,
my first night of planning included totally immersing myself into the curriculum;
I had to ultimately familiarize myself with ALL portions of what this
curriculum had to offer. It took a
lot of time and I of course, could have implanted without spending that amount
of time, but again, I had to begin with my end goal in mind.
That Friday, was not the end of my planning, I planned up to
one hour each night for the next day’s instruction. *My first point of personal learning – good teaching requires
great planning, reflection and follow-up!
I’ve known this and preach this often, but after wearing my principal
hat for the past six years – this perspective really came to life for me
again. Often, it is this portion
of a teacher’s career, the planning, checking papers and essays, as well as
catching students up that are absent throughout the week, that is consistently
overlooked by stakeholders. Good
teaching requires great planning, reflection and follow-up – which consumes a
lot of time.
Throughout the week, I also realized just how much I miss
the classroom! Teaching is
incredibly hard work, but is also one of the most rewarding professions that I
could ever imagine! Our learning
targets in the classroom during the week included sequencing a biography and
writing a summary of the several passages that we read. Observing the student work was worth
the price of gold to me! I saw
growth and implementation of the skills that I was hoping students would gain
throughout the week, and to me, this was priceless! I loved to see the expression on a student’s face, when they
finally “got it”.
The second point of personal learning for me, was that our
new curriculum is exactly what I had been hearing it was, from the teachers
perspective. Our curriculum
materials contain too many great resources to fit into our 120-minute block of
literacy. While all materials and
instructional standards available and suggested are wonderful and incredibly
rigorous – the reality is plain and simple, it cannot all be done! We as professionals need to make
decisions about how we can best meet the core curriculum implementation,
through creating a design of instruction that facilitates strong
implementation. I believe this is
through the reading and writing workshop model, and our classrooms must look
different than they had previously.
I plan to provide better instructional leadership to help teachers make
this happen!
Finally, as I feel often at Denver Elementary, I felt so, so
proud of our teachers. I had a
recent conversation with an individual from outside our district, and he
mentioned that our implementation is a model for others. Our teachers are very professional, hard
working, and passionate! This
shows everyday at our elementary school!
My final take-away, was that our teachers are working hard and are
really doing a great job implementing the “shifts” required within
implementation of the Iowa Core Curriculum.
My conclusion is that every principal and/or instructional
leader needs to become a practitioner and place themselves back in the
“trenches”. For me, it was the
most rewarding experience I have ever had as a principal! I will say, however, that my principal
duties took a back seat, and I was up late each night trying to make up for the
time that I took away from that very important responsibility. As a matter of fact, it is an
expectation within our district, that we as principals get into every classroom
each week, and complete a formal walk-through. This unfortunately didn’t happen, however, when I walk
through classrooms from now on, I will do so as a stronger instructional
leader, one that I couldn’t have imagined being, prior to walking a mile in one
fifth grade teacher’s shoes!
