and lesson plan collections. This year the district has also mandated that principals do classroom walk-throughs. Most administrators already do this as a form of informal evaluation. The difference is that, now, the district has given a form with specific actions to be observed.
Alta Vista Elementary School has undergone total reconstruction in since 2001. “Bring home the bacon, bring home the steak, bring home the lobster, and bring home the golden A” has been the themes for Alta Vista’s success. With the extraordinary leadership of the principal, Constance White-Davis, this school moved from a school-grade of a “D” to a school grade of an “A”. It is has maintained an “A” grade for two years in a row.
I am proud to say that I have been a part of Alta Vista Elementary School’s success. As a beginning teacher, hoping to start teaching high school, I wasn’t sure what to expect the first day at an elementary school. My first class was a fifth grade class. I decided to teach the song, “This Land is Your Land.” As I was taught to do, I asked students to read aloud together. When faced with the word Island, all of the students pronounced it “Is – land”. This one little word brought my first year excitement down to the lowest of low. “What are the teachers teaching?” I asked myself. These students had made it all the way to the fifth grade without realizing the silent “s”. I had to revamp my whole approach to teaching music. Music didn’t seem as important anymore when the students couldn’t read. So I started teaching music using many of the reading strategies I had studied in college: read-a-louds, phonemic awareness activities, word walls and letter recognition. This was the year our school received a “C” with only two points away from a “B”. The following year, our principal ordered that all teachers, including specials, should teach reading. Everyday that was all the students heard, “Read, read, read!” I started doing more activities that included reading. Describe the feeling and Composers of the Month are two activities that I stared doing to comply with the new mandates. Students listened to music from a certain composer. Then they would draw picture and write descriptive paragraph telling how the music made them feel. This allowed students to reach there reading goal as well as writing goals. I hoped for my room to become a word rich environment. So I started putting up word walls with descriptive and musical words on them. The art teacher and I started working together, using the same words for our word walls and reading the same books to the students. This caused our school grade to increase to a “strong B”. I even started giving test every week with a scantron bubble sheet just so the students would get used to entering answers on a scantron. The following year I started doing karaoke as a fun way to increase phonemic awareness, word and letter recognition, and reading speed. I also started turning on the captions for every video. It seemed the students eyes were drawn to the closed caption box, so they were forced to read. This particular year, Ms. White-Davis, the principal asked everyone to include math also. So I quickly used this opportunity to show how math and music are directly related. What is music, really? Strategically placing note values in different places to form one big mathematic equation. I used the note values to make math problems. The problems ranged from addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions. The physical education teacher also started doing counting activities while exercising. Finally, we earned an “A”. I can only tell this success story because all of the teachers pulled together and got on board with the vision of the our leader. We were given ample time to prepare for our lessons. There was some opposition along the way. Even I opposed the music, art, and physical education teacher teaching more reading and math than their own subject. Several of the other teachers also complained because their students were not getting as much movement and activity time in the classes “where they are supposed to burn-off energy”. However, we never stopped working toward the set goal, which was and still is to move student achievement.
As I started to remember the changes Alta Vista went through, several theories come to my mind. In my opinion, the theory that fits this school the best is the CBAM, Concerns-Based Adoption Model. The composite representation of the feelings, preoccupation, thought, and consideration given to a particular issue or task is called concern.” (Hall & Hord, p. 61) Using FCAT testing data our school leadership noticed that the reading scores were down. This is what caused our school not to achieve our “A”, thus starting the first stage of concern, awareness. The seven stages have been defined by the expressions of concern that individuals make at the various stages. When the individual is not related to or influenced by the innovation in any way, concerns are typically characterized as "not being concerned about it," and this is stage 0 (Hord, 1990). My first year at Alta Vista I knew we were a “D” school but it really did not concern me. I was not aware of the school’s struggle to do better. I did not hear anyone on campus discuss how raise FCAT scores. It seemed business as usual with the other teachers. It seems reasonable to suggest that "business as usual" will produce results as usual. Thus, if different results are desired, then "business" in the school and classroom will, of necessity, have to be different. Changes in the school staff's knowledge, understanding, skills, and behaviors will be required (Hord, 1990). Then we progressed to the informational stage of concern. We had several data reading sessions. We look at the scores of low achieving students and what they were or were not doing to reach that score. We then realize that our low achieving students came from our low-income families. Families who could not spend time reading with their children because of work or other circumstances. Many of these families did not have the resources to buy the needed materials. This led to questioning about reading activities that could be done at school since many of the children were not getting this attention at home. When a new program or innovation appears to have the potential to become part of an individual's life, then stage 1, or informational concerns, become uppermost. These concerns relate to an interest in acquiring information about the innovation. As informational concerns develop, stage 2 personal concerns become highly predictable. The individual wonders how the new program will affect him/her and whether he/she may have the ability to work appropriately with the innovation. (Hord, 1990). We then started the Accelerated Reader program. The students would have to read a book and answer question about it on the computer. Then for every score of seventy or higher, the student is given points depending on the book’s level of difficulty. The school advisory council also instituted the DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) program. The normal time that I met with my chorus had to be changed because DEAR time was not to be interrupted. Then all teachers were asked to focus on reading. The principal wanted reading in cooperative-learning groups. It seemed I was teaching more reading than music. As individuals begin implementation, stage 3 management concerns become intense. It is easy to understand that teachers have high management concerns while they are learning to cope with the demands of new programs and practices. This is especially true during implementation of an innovation such as cooperative learning, where restructured arrangements of students and teachers are expected. Managing a roomful of student committees, each structuring their own learning experiences within their membership, produces teachers' concerns about controlling time, noise-level, activity, and student behaviors. At this point, time to understand the requirements and logistics of putting new practices into place become factors in high need of attention. "Mastering" management and its attendant concerns will require substantial time (Hord, 1990). Being a new teacher, this became very overwhelming. Planning and organization was not one of my strongest skills. It seemed as if I was doing more learning and reading than the students. Other teachers complained about these new reading programs also. Consequently, other subjects were not given adequate attention due to reading being the primary goal. Teachers had not mastered the incorporation of reading skills into every subject. So they adopted the SRA guided reading program. In this program other subjects were intergraded into the reading activities. This actually created more work for teachers because this program is scripted. The script must be followed exactly the way it is written or the whole lesson is disrupted. Hall and associates discovered that, once the intensity of concerns at stages 1, 2, and 3 are reduced, then there is the possibility that individuals will increase their stage 4 consequence concerns. Consequence concerns focus on the effects of the innovation on students, and interest by the individual in making the innovation and its use more effective for students (or whomever the "client" is). For instance, teachers who have been developing students' critical thinking skills as an isolated discipline, may, after they feel comfortable with the strategies involved, determine that critical thinking would be more effective for their students if it were integrated with academic subject areas. Considering this kind of action would reflect consequence concerns (Hord, 1990). Even though the teachers were having some negative feelings about the new changes, the students were excelling. The students were making gains in reading and writing that were unforeseen. It seem they were excited about the new point system. Students were walking over the campus reading. However, the students only started reading books that would help them get accelerated reader points. Some teachers could their students excited about reading anything while others had to force their students to read.
Many individuals will never reach either intense stage 5 collaboration concerns, which relate to collaborating with others to increase the outcomes of the innovations, or stage 6 refocusing concerns, which focus on major ways to enhance or change the program to further increase effectiveness. Frequently such collaboration and refocusing are forestalled by new demands and innovations "coming down the pike" to schools. Because of the changes in the district, our teachers were forced to do stages five and six. All teachers were required to take part in curriculum mapping. The teachers map out activities that they do in their classrooms and share with others. Then if one teacher is strong in a certain area there asked to share with the other teachers on their team. This approach seems to have affected our school positively. We have maintained an “A” for two years now.
The Concerns Based Adoption Method seemed to work very well in this instance. However, It would be healthy to apply other theories in this given situation. Appreciate Inquiry is a way of thinking, seeing, and acting for powerful, purposeful change in organizations. Appreciative inquiry works on the assumption that whatever you want more of already exists in all organizations. While traditional problem-solving processes separate and dissect pieces of a system, appreciative inquiry generates images that affirm the forces that give life and energy to a system (Hall & Hammond). This would have given the changes in the reading curriculum a different feeling. In this case the teachers would not have been given a work overload. They could have just kept doing what was working. For example the students at Alta Vista have always done well in math. Even when they fail other subjects they pass in math. One year the principal even said, “ Let’s focus on what works!” In this appreciative inquiry approach we focused on the gains made in math and the system used in yielding those gains. Appreciative Inquiry Truly honors the past and that is another reason it is a wonderful way to help people manage change. Those of us who use it often use the word; “magical” when we describe the power we have experienced. The magic comes from the great relief from participants that the message isn’t about what they’ve done wrong or have to stop doing. It is an affirmation that much is well and ready to be nurtured (Hall and Hammond).
I think our results would have been the same using this theory as well. We could have figured out the methods used in teaching math and used those same methods in teaching reading. This would have cut down some of the resistance from the teachers. Being the music teacher, I would not have had to change my curriculum. I was already doing the reading activities but the focus was on music. It is always my goal to use music as a means to teach other subjects. Instead I was teaching reading in order to teach music. Using the four “D” method from the power point, we could have discovered what we were doing right. As stated early, our math score were always high. So whatever the teachers were doing, was working. Then dream what our purpose will be. Where would we like to see our students in the future? What are our goals? Dreaming is an important stage because this where your vision comes in to play. This is where the past is tied to where we want to be in the future. Next is to design the plan. How is this dream organized? What relationships are formed? Once your dream and design is in place, then destiny falls in line. Destiny, most likely, is a time line of what is expected from this plan. What are the common practices that align the future with the past? (Cooperrider)
This opens the door for the next change theory, systems dynamics. Over the last decade, system dynamics and systems thinking have begun to make their way into kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) education in the United States. In several pioneering schools across the country, system dynamics is becoming an integral part of the curriculum, and systems thinking are permeating the culture and management of the school. Teachers using the approach have found that it enhances their current curriculum by making it more learner-centered, interdisciplinary, and relevant. Using behavior over time graphs, causal loop diagrams, and stock/flow diagrams and system dynamics models, students become engaged in working together to understand the causes of problems across disciplines. Teachers are often amazed by what their students can do—they ask better questions, seek their own answers, and gain deeper insights than they did before. As other teachers have observed these benefits for students, they have also tried the approach in their classes. Now the ideas of systems education are appearing more frequently in education publications and at conferences, and many other teachers and administrators are giving them a try (Lyneis, 2000). Systems’ thinking, in practice, is a continuum of activities, which range from the conceptual to the technical.
At the conceptual end of the spectrum is adoption of a systems perspective or viewpoint. You are adopting a systems viewpoint when you are standing back far enough — in both space and time — to be able to see the underlying web of ongoing, reciprocal relationships, which are cycling to produce the patterns of behavior that a system is exhibiting. You're employing a systems perspective when you can see the forest (of relationships), for the trees. You are not employing a systems perspective when you get "trapped in an event". Anyone who has gazed out at the lights from high above a city, or gazed down upon a river valley from a mountaintop, has a good sense of what "standing back far enough" means. Details fade. Patterns of relationships emerge (Richmond, 1991). Thinking about the big picture is what this theory is all about. I started doing this in the misdt of our changing systems at Alta Vista. I started incorporating activities that deal with real life. When my students came to music, they learned more than just music. I tied history of jazz music to American history. I also started doing math with music. This included the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of note values. This helped students practice fractions, decimals, and graphs. I think it is important to find some life-applications for any learning that takes places in the class. This also enable the students to use the tools for systems dynamics such as charts, bar and line graphs. They will be able to track their own learning.
Finally, I have applied and analyzed several change theories in relation to the change that has taken place at Alta Vista Elementary School. After applying all of the theories to this situation, it seems that they all were relevant. In this case, one can draw the following conclusion. To reach a very positive change, one must use each theory when and where it is needed. They are entangled together.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment