Committed to letting teachers teach
For a number of years, I taught science in a high-poverty Brooklyn school where 25 percent of the students were homeless at some point in the year. The students’ proficiency scores were in the bottom half of all NYC schools. In 2019, my students scored in the top 6 percent of all NYC students on the Earth Science Regents. Just two years earlier they had been in the bottom 50 percent of the city when they entered our school. My approach to teaching included experimenting, testing and reapplying methods that I found worked with my students. I was grateful that my principal gave me the autonomy and freedom to teach the way that worked best for my students.
As a Sioux Falls School Board member, I will be committed to empowering teachers in the same way. I have a plan to identify and utilize highly effective educators as trainers. Professional Development (PD) should not just focus on administrative functions. More importantly, PDs should provide curriculum support. My plan involves conducting teacher surveys to tailor professional development to what teachers feel they need.
Teachers are professionals and should be treated as such. Schools should emphasize autonomy and eliminate micromanagement of staff. Allowing teachers the freedom to bring forward best practices and have a voice in the professional development they need will help foster a team atmosphere which will benefit all students.
I know teachers find joy in seeing their students succeed. I also know that teachers in the District are frustrated with how to implement classroom management conducive to learning and how to navigate the reefs and barriers set up by the administration. In order to overcome this problem, I would propose we first identify our highly effective teachers to train others in classroom management techniques.
Second, the administration will assist in some key tools for improvement. One such improvement would be helping teachers to make phone calls home. In my teaching, I used robo calls to regularly communicate with parents. Those were used for informational calls. When parent contacts related to infractions or poor grades were needed, I personally made those calls. It didn’t take my students very long to understand their parents didn’t want to get those in-person calls, and outcomes changed for the better. I would also propose the district create an online reporting system so teachers can report infractions that would be visible to other teachers (with respect to privacy as required). In NYC I could let teachers and parents see any write up I made if it was appropriate.
Third, the public schools must bite the bullet and enforce the rules even if this exposes the public to the fact that a lot of chaos exists within many schools. We cannot accurately treat the problem if we can't accurately diagnose the problem. Finally, I would like to discuss with our highly effective teachers what they think about the PBIS system.
