Yet another chapter that challenged and affirmed my thinking. Many of the elements of the article are reflected in a recent blog post by Greg Whitby especially around the area of changing the way we report to the parents. As was mentioned on page 203 and again on page 218 - the need to have 'brief communication on a regular basis' rather than a twice a year report session which is currently the practice in many of our schools. The challenge for me is how do you manage to do this on regular basis with all the other aspects to teacher pulling you in all the other directions as well. How can we move away from the paper work and move towards what is really going to have an impact on the learning of the students? This question remains unanswered.
Parent engagement beyond the " feel good community events' is such an important part of our role as teacher/ educators. Wanting our school to be a higher performing school brings us to the challenge of being able to - focus on building trust, collaborative relationships among teachers, families and community members.
recognise, respect and address families' needs, as well as class and cultural differences.
Embrace a philosophy of partnership in which power and responsibility are shared (pg 202) seems like a huge mountain to climb at the moment.
However keeping the points noted on page 208 - 209 should definitely lead us in the right directions especially if we use them to reflect on our current practice and drive us forward as suggested in BF post. Using them as an examination of conscience and being open and honest with ourselves as well as community members I believe is the way forward to true collaboration.
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Chapter 3 delves deeper in the difference between the 'Bypass' and 'Engage' approaches and also reinforces the need to reduc... -
The first chapter focuses heavily on reducing change to increase improvement. The most interesting point I took out of th...
Do you feel sometimes we need to rethink what we do instead of just doing things because that's the way it has always been? But when do we have time to stop, assess, evaluate and then make changes? Changing these processes takes time but if we were reporting by a written report mid year and yearly in the 1960s when I was at school perhaps in this digital age there is an alternative?
ReplyDeleteAgreed - Sometimes outside factors seem to hold us in the past - although they appear in the media to be pushing us forward.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we have to be be brave and 'radical' and do the change rather than wait to be directed by 'someone' to do it?