One of the most important messages coming from Senge, Orientation, Sections 1 – 5, is the connection between the classroom, the school and the community. The school where I am principal is located in a small community, population approximately 10,000 people. It has been a part of this community for 56 years. A small community has its advantages. We have a local newspaper that keeps the community informe3d of all of the school’s accomplishments. The teachers at the school call upon local community members to come into the classroom to teach various lessons; for example, the curator at the town museum is also an archeologist and comes into the 6th grade to teach a lesson on archeology, the 2nd grade has a week in which local businessmen people come into the classroom to speak about their jobs, a retired gentleman comes into various classrooms to teach cultural dancing, the local police force provides their drug enforcement officer to speak to the junior high on drug awareness, 3rd grade visits a local winery, as well as, an olive oil company to learn about Sonoma County’s agricultural products, etc. The community is always invited to any activity that takes place at the school. This helps to keep the community connected to the school in a very important way.
Another important message from this reading was the school as a place for organizational learning. The five key disciplines play an important part of this. These help to deal with the many and various pressures of education today. I think that one of the biggest concerns today is keeping the school in line with the shifts in society and family that affect children. At St. John School, in the past 10 years, it has been increasingly important to deal with the split family. Many children are shifted from mom’s to dad’s home every other week. This becomes very confusing for children as well as, for the teacher. As a faculty we have had to discuss this and come up with ways to help mom and dad keep some method of similarity in working with their children. We continue to need to work with divorced families. At the same time, we had to look long and hard at the type of child in our classrooms today. We all know, the nineteenth century industrial world school model just does not work today. As a faculty, one of the most important shifts to the technological world that we made this year was the purchase of Smartboards for all classrooms at the school. These boards have made quite an impact in the teaching and delivery of lessons. They are a colorful tool. Researchers indicate that students respond to displays where color is employed. The Smartboard can accommodate different styles of learning. Tactile learners can benefit from touching and marking at the board, audio learners can have the class discussion recorded for playing back at a later time, and visual learners can see what is taking place as it develops at the board. Smartboards were originally used in the business world for group meetings. They have made quite an impact at the school where I work.
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It's great to hear about all the community involvement. I'm sure the adults who come in get as much from the experience as do the students.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in your use of technology at the school. In terms of split families, we've found the use of Powerschool (or similar online student information systems) helpful in terms of communication. Rather than have one primary contact or having to send mailings to two households, each parent has access to student information, including grades and homework. Do you use this sort of system or are your issues not about this sort of communication? I'm also interested in your use of smartboards. Specifically, do students (or parents) ever listen to a recorded class at a later time? How are they made available? Do teachers post them online or are many making use of this feature? What have students said about this opportunity?
What a great example of an involved community! I can tell why you chose to work in our group for the Senge presentation project.
ReplyDeleteI also work a school that has been a long standing presence in the community but we don't invite the broader community in as much as your school does. I think this lack of involvement comes from sort of sense of fear of what will happen or what they will say about us. I don't really know where that comes from because I haven't been here long, but there does seem to be some kind of history there. Your stories of successful community involvement (and the D.C. trip) continue to encourage me to try to open up our school more to our broader community.
I like your examples taken from your experience. They help me to make sens of what I read in Senge's book. My school in Hungary is a good community with successful students and also we developed rather good relationships with the local community. One of our best way of connecting to our environment is given to us thanks to our service learning program. Many teachers and of course students have thereby opportunity to get involved. Unfortunately, our relationship with the local authorities might suffer when the political arena is dominated by anti-Church politicians.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your thoughts.
I agree with Ference, your thoughts and examples from your personal experiences really help make the text tangible for me. It sounds like there is a true connection and relationship between your classrooms, school, and community. Although I haven't had a lot of teaching experience, I can relate to your Smartboard use and recognize the impact it's had on your students. It sounds like you have your faculty and staff taking full advantage of integrating the Smartboards into their everyday lessons. We have a Smartboard in every class at my school, but the industrial age vs. digital age comes into play with a few of our teachers and some of our Smartboards are not utilized.
ReplyDeleteI actually didn't know you can record class discussions on a Smartboard – I’m definitely going to learn how to do that and pass the information on to my head teacher. Thanks for the insight!
I appreciate your perspective from a small town. Those visitors sound so great. I'm sure students are more likely to remember a visitor then a lesson. This serves to remind me I need to develop connections within the city and invite them to my classroom more often.
ReplyDeleteI think that the most important concept I came away with after reading, Best Practices, Chapters 8 and 9 is the idea of balance. A teacher needs to find balance in the classroom. “Balance is the key.” As a teacher, and now a principal, this has always been my way of thinking. The seven structures of best practices was very helpful in putting the emphasis of a student-centered classroom in perspective. I think, as educators, it is most important to “make it real” for the students in our classrooms. Take the classroom’s curriculum and make it authentic, make it genuine and bring bits of the world into schools or bring the students out into the world. Students, whenever they hear that a field trip is scheduled, get very excited. The real world is waiting for them. Each year, at the school where I work, we take the 8th grade class to Washington, DC for the week. Each day is filled with authentic, exciting events that make real learning happen. The 8th graders also got to choose some of the activities that they would be involved in over this week, making them a real, responsible partner in the curriculum planning. Along with traveling out onto the fields at Gettysburg, they also wanted to visit the Spy Museum and learn about various espionage activities over the years. The pre visit activities, the research work that goes on during the trip and the follow-up work that concludes the trip, as well as, the events during the week’s stay in Washington make this a learning experience that could never be duplicated in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteChapter 9 dealt with making changes within the curriculum. I agree with the idea that change can be very difficult at times especially with teachers that have been at the job for many years. I have also watched as we attend inservices with wonderful ideas being presented, but if I did not require that a new idea needs to be practiced within the next few weeks, I am not sure that it would happen. We had an inservice on Classroom Management where the presented gave all kinds of very practical, wonderful ideas for management in the classroom. I had the faculty choose one idea that they especially connected with and try it in the classroom over the next two weeks. During this two week period, each teacher would journal their findings at the end of each day. At the end of the two week period, during the faculty meeting, we all shared the positive and negative that came from this experience. Many teachers found that what was tried worked wonderfully and it became a part of their classroom management techniques. Others asked for advice from faculty members to fine tune what they had experienced. All in all, this was a very positive experience for all at the school, both students and faculty members alike.