How do you create and maintain a school environment where learning is a priority among all stakeholders?
Many schools’ mission statements state that learning is a priority and their beliefs include an attitude that all students can learn. What does it mean to have student learning be the center of the school? Student learning is the focus in every school meeting including School Advisory Council, Parent Teacher Association, Teacher Professional Development training, Data Chats and all other school events. It should all connect to student learning.
When this is the case, effective school leaders spend the majority of their time on teaching and learning. Therefore, school leaders should be gathering data, monitoring data, observing teacher practice, discussing data with teachers, students, and parents through data chats and/or conferences, making decisions based on the data, determining the effective instructional strategies and programs that can increase student achievement, and providing teachers opportunities to learn new initiatives or improve current initiatives.
Imagine entering a surgery room in a cardiology hospital unit where the doctors and nurses are to work on a patient’s heart so he can live. During your time in the surgery room, you observe them talking about correcting the patient’s knee and they are repairing the ACL on the patient’s knee. Do you think the results of the heart surgery would be successful? No. It cannot yield successful results because the focus is not on the purpose of the surgery, which is to correct the problems with the heart. The doctors and nurses’ priority was not repairing the heart because they became distracted from the goal and used their energy to correct the torn ACL in the knee.
This example is similar to a school whose actions do not reflect that student learning is a priority. This means teachers are not creating lesson plans that are aligned to standards, employing effective instructional strategies to assist students in meeting the standards, assessing students to monitor the effectiveness of the instruction and reflecting on their practice. This also means that the school leaders are not observing the classrooms to monitor the effectiveness of the teachers in student learning and are not meeting with them to discuss student information that includes assessment results and demographic data.
The surgeon in the operating room did not have a goal or a plan for the surgery that was aligned to the patient's medical problem or need. Leaders should be visible in the classroom, because this is where learning is supposed to occur. The operating room is where surgery occurs. Like the surgeon, the teacher has to create goals that are aligned to standards and create a plan that reflects an understanding of their students’ needs, which includes their deficiencies and strengths.
