A Look in the Mirror

Okay… I have lived in the ivory tower of district office administration for 4 years and am finally back in the classroom after a lay-off of 7 years. Yes… the first day of school was freaky frightening facing my first 11th grade homeroom! However, for 4 years I was in the position to have to tell my peers what to do, how to do it, and in such a manner that they were convinced that it would work… no matter what their intelligence said to the contrary! And now it is time for me to see if what I was preaching was really doable… So here are the results from my first semester back….


My belief system is that the key to an effective classroom is organization and planning.

Is it possible to do all the things that we (Ivory Tower Gurus) know to be effective in the amount of time that we (Ivory Tower Guru’s) have allotted in our instructional periods?

I answer a resounding YES! With the caveat of that magical “IF” we (Reality Based Instructional Staff) have the appropriate time to plan and organize our lesson.

As the details and expectations increase so to must the planning time to achieve the desired end. Therefore – a note to administration…. If you expect effective teachers to meet and exceed your desired level of effective instruction, you (Administrative Honcho’s) must be prepared to:

• Limit the amount of preparations (courses taught at the secondary level) by any teacher

• Bell to bell instruction requires a tremendous amount of planning and organizational structure. To ask a teacher to plan bell to bell for more than one unrelated subject is asking for all but one of the classes to be shorted.

And I mean ‘tight’ relationships… Biology and AP Biology is okay… 2 different classes in the same instructional family are not. Even if you have another teacher writing the plans and collaboratively sharing… it doesn’t work, I wish it did… So, you must choose – and if you assign more than 1 preparation, make allowances knowing that you are putting the teachers in a position to not be as effective as they could be.

• As much as we administrators would like to believe otherwise … teachers do have lives outside of the school.. (SHOCK…GASP!).

We have made adjustments in our thinking to accommodate the different lives of our students outside of the classroom; we need to understand that our teacher’s lives outside of the school have changed as well.


As a teacher I have always been willing to come in early, and I will stay after the bell if my children don’t have ballet lessons, art lessons, doctor’s appointments, or a football game/practice/sleep over … but I do not take my work home. So if it can’t be done in the time allotted to me at school, guess what… it doesn’t get done.


I try and prioritize my daily activities so that my critical assignments are completed 1st, however, because I am still building up my repertoire in my new subject areas… that means that some things that I would like to do like plan a cool lab, etc. get put on the backburner because I had 3 unexpected meetings that cut into my planning time and now I am back to... ewww book work quickly adapted into a collaborative activity.

• Allow teachers time to build up proficiency in one area and/or with a specific co-teacher before changing up their course loads

• Okay, this semester I have 3 different co-teachers that I am working with and 2 different subject preparations.
• I teach 2 Economics classes with 2 different teachers and 1 World History class. 
• The students on my instructional caseload range from independent with minor accommodations to IQ’s of 42 but adaptive skills that put them in the MID range landing them in the general education setting.
• 1 Econ teacher teaches the textbook and 1 Econ teacher is learning how to teach the frameworks (our suggested state course map developed through teacher collaboration). So neither teacher is teaching the same thing at the same time. My co-teacher in World History has only 1 section of WH and 2 World Geography classes. She has taught the text book before but is now moving into using the frameworks.
• I may get to work with 1 of the Econ teachers again next semester… that will be the only consistency in my schedule.
• The administrative expectations for me (and yeah… they and the teachers I work with know my background in instruction….) are to: 
• Teach the GPS standards to proficiency in an effective standards based classroom environment using Best Practices.
• This would be demonstrated by 80% of my students passing the required, standardized, on grade level, End of Course Exam with a score of 80%.
• Develop an effective co-teaching environment that allows for collaboration and effective differentiated instruction that meets the needs of all the students in the room by:
• Making appropriate accommodations, not modifications (they are receiving Carnegie unit credit), 
• Progress monitoring the students on my instructional caseload on a bi-monthly basis as indicated on their IEP, chart my data, and send it home every 4.5 weeks.
• Communicating and interceding on behalf of all the students on my caseload, regardless of whether or not they are on my instructional load.

And I can do this… BUT… I need a foundation of effective instruction to build from.

If:

• The instruction in the existing classroom is textbook driven…
• Is content teacher directed and the kids still sit in rows…
• The Smart Board/Promethean Board is used as a projector screen…
• The students assigned to my instructional caseload are inappropriately placed…
• Don’t have access to or a space for my cart…

I am going to fail in some way to meet your expectations and/or my student’s needs.

So I have spent the semester:

• Working with my co-teachers to develop a relationship that may or may not ever be used again.
• Introduced some instructional ideas that are based around best practices of a standards based classroom (to mixed reviews)
• Differentiated where I could and modified the curriculum where I couldn’t
• Don’t even ask me about Progress monitoring or why my test scores suck …. Just write me up.

• Set a clear and consistent mission… belief statement… priority… for your instructional staff. Be clear on what you want me to accomplish, and then put me in a position to be successful in meeting those expectations.

Since being out of the tower and back in reality… there is not much that has changed in my initial belief on effective instruction… the key to an effective classroom is organization and planning. If, as an administrator, I am not getting effective instruction from my staff, I need to look in the mirror to the amount of organization and planning that I am putting in to placing them in positions to be effective.