The best laid plans...A Culture of Change pt. 4

So you are in a new position.  This new position gives you some sphere of influence.  You can be an agent of change to your school's culture.  Then the work begins and you see the line inspired by the Robert Burns poem is true: "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry."  Most of what you have planned to do in your new position isn't going to work based on the clientele you are going to work with.  Outmoded thinking would lead one to believe this is an indictment on the clientele.  If people continued in this modality of thought; we wouldn't have any teachers in low-income/high poverty areas.  When you want to foster change where you serve people, it isn't the people that have to change; it's you.  If your program, ideas, or vision won't work with the people you are serving, you have to change.  Maybe things will evolve so that your vision can be implemented; until then you have to meet people where they are. 

This was such a lesson learned for me.  At the beginning of the year I had what I thought was a well formulated plan based on a vision I had for implementing this new teacher support program.  I was going to look at school wide data and created math and English goals based on our data.  Those goals were going to lead to student-centered instructional strategies to meet these goals.  It all sounded grand and splendid; then I got into the soup and found out my clientele wasn't quite ready for that level of support.  As I began to speak with my colleagues, I found their immediate needs to be quite different from my vision. 

So now I have all of this new information.  What do I do with it?  I had to model the one important foundation of education I wanted all of my colleagues to use; the data had to drive the instruction. Therefore, our weekly meetings have taken on more of a methods course.  There are so many inexperience colleagues making the transition to teaching and they don't have the theory depth that most lifers (like myself) have that we've gone in depth about intentional planning; using data to drive instruction; how to question to engage students among other things. 

Personally, this had to be okay with me.  One thing we know from research is if teachers aren't engaged in their content their students tend not to be engaged either.  I took this on as a challenge to improve my colleagues depth of knowledge.  Once their comfort with the foundational elements of instruction improve then the more rigorous parts of the vision can be implemented.