Coming Soon

There's change in the wind - can you feel it?  I can.

Over the last few weeks, some fairly radical changes have taken place in the upper echelon's of our zone in the district.  I won't go in to details at this time, but I'll do my best to summarize without minimizing the roles of those involved.

If you've been following my blog for some time, you're likely already familiar with the ridiculosity of the events that take place at my school.  Last year, the majority of those documented events took place in my classroom, since that's where I focused the majority of my efforts.  This year has been a huge eye opener for me as I've reigned in the craziness of my classroom, and become aware of the atrocities that are taking place at my school on a larger scale. To some degree this saddens me, because I love reading about the hilarious events that took place in my classroom, because let's face it - 7th graders are pretty ridiculous.  However, this year, I can honestly say that the number of hilarious events that take place in my classroom really don't extend much beyond the occasional funny comment or absurd action.  So, the number of anecdotal stories have receded and  been replaced with (hopefully) more meaningful, larger scale issues that I've encountered.

If all goes well in the next few weeks, hopefully even the ridiculosity of events school wide will start to subside.  And it all started with a letter.

A letter that was sent to the San Francisco board of education that clearly delineated the injustices that have been allowed to propagate at my school for the last few months, and in reality, the last few years.  This letter started a ripple effect that originally had me worried about the unknown, but has since led to the movement of personnel and resources that I have no doubt will ultimately be for the better.

I'm not going to elaborate on the movement of personnel as of right now, because everything I've heard thus far is heresy, and fundamentally unsubstantiated.  However, if what I hear is true, it will be amazing.

However, I would love to elaborate on the movement of resources, because it has led to a transformation in the staff at my school.

A few weeks back our staff had a meeting with some district admins who came to our school to discuss this letter that had been sent to their superiors.  The outcome of this meeting basically was that there are a ton of problems at our school, and they need to be fixed.  It was pointed out that our staff is well aware of the issues, but we never have time to collaborate, address, or discuss potential solutions to the issues.  So we were given the promise of time and resources to collaborate and come up with solutions for the issues.  The next day, I met with Katey and another staff member at the school, and we outlined some of the issues that needed to be discussed as a staff, and came up with an agenda for our scheduled meeting the following day.

The next day, our staff met and we discussed the various issues our school is plagued with, and potential solutions.  We broke the staff up into smaller groups, with each group brainstorming possible solutions to the issues, and then reconvened to have everyone share out the solutions that they had come up with.  After getting a great list of possible solutions, Katey and I spent a few hours outlining a comprehensive solution that incorporated as many of the ideas as possible from our staff as we could.

The solution that we devised essentially consisted of creating a school economy that utilized what we termed "Scholar Dollars" which could be used to purchase items from the school store that we will be opening. We pitched the plan to the staff, and given that our plan incorporated so many ideas from the entire staff, they could all sense the elements of their contribution to the program and it was heartily approved.

I have spent many, many hours thinking through this plan, and one of the things that I did along the way was the break it up into individual responsibilities.  Being the dork that I am, I even created an organization chart, discussed the responsibilities with the staff, and had people volunteer for specific tasks and committees.   After each person was assigned to a committee, we all broke up and everyone went their ways to work on accomplishing their task.

Since that time, our school has been a flurry of activity.  It has been amazing to see how much these teachers have been getting on board with our plan, which I probably should mention that we are calling it "Earning 4 Learning", or E4L for short.  Each teacher has their specific responsibility, and they really have been owning up to it.  And everyone has been pitching in to work out the details, and make sure that E4L is going to be a success.  In the 18 months that I've been at my school, this is the first time I have seen teacher a) enthusiastically working together b) excited about a program at our school c) believing that change is possible and d) that together, we can really make a difference.  Literally, here are some of the comments I've heard in the last few days:

• "I think this is the first time that I'm not dreading coming to school on Monday."
• "There's no way this isn't going to work - there's just so much potential!"
• "This is what being a teacher is supposed to be like."
• "This must be what it's like teaching at a normal school."
• "It's been so much fun to be able to express some creative problem solving in a meaningful way."
• "I didn't think there'd be anyway that we were going to actually get (specific teachers) involved, but look what they've done!"
• "I finally feel like what I'm doing is going to make a difference to the students."
• "This is a perfect application of algebra!  And it's so much fun!  If only we could bring this kind of real world experience to our students..."

It's been an incredible experience getting to see our staff really gel together and make this program go forward.  As of right now, it's 100% untested, unproven, and any tangible results are yet-to-be-seen.  There have been many challenges along the way, including a last minute announcement that none of the previously-promised funding would actually be available for us to use.  That was a big scare, but I'm hopeful that we've worked through that one.  However, with the enthusiasm of our staff, the confidence in the plan, and how much buy in we have at almost every level, it's really difficult for me to see any points of failure.  Sure, sure, I know - they will quickly become blatantly obvious to me, but as of right now, I believe that there are big changes coming soon.