Changing Culture

Changing Culture at your school 3. How would you describe the culture where you currently work? Did any of Barth's stories ring true for you? My school is high achieving in both the students and the teachers. I sometimes feel when we meet for our face to face grad classes that the expectations at our school is higher. We have PLC meetings like everyone else, but our must take place outside of the school day and for one hour a week. I have gone to the PLC conferences and they always say to make time for your staff to have these meetings, that time is on our watch and not theirs. Other schools get to have that time to work in teams on their half or amended days. I do feel that our non-tenured staff does not have as much of a voice as the tenured staff does. This is not written anywhere, but more of a feeling or advice given by veteran teachers. We have had a big change in administration and how goals are achieved. Quoted from a friend of mine "Our goals were always teacher driven and admin supported the teachers, now the goals have changed to admin driven." At our school we are being pushed to try and do the next big things, whether that be balanced calendar, standard based grading, technology and so on. There is very rarely a moment when someone stops and says you are doing a good job and have been doing a good job. There is a constant feeling of you are never doing good enough. This is a hard feeling to have when you have innovated new opportunities for students, are part of different organizations, trying new technology, putting in long hours and doing more than you ever have as a teacher all to know that you probably will never do good enough. I believe in reflecting and tweaking to make things better, but this feeling at our school is bigger than that. 4. Can you change your school's culture? Do you have a choice? Recently the big discussion has been about balanced calendar. We as teachers have not seen the hard data that the balanced calendar is better or the specific need for our district. This has caused a lot of backlash about the calendar. There is a big concern about choice. Do we has teachers really have a choice in the change of the calendar? We are told our opinion matters, but it is not clear in the future if it does. A straw poll was given that 18 yes for the balanced calendar, 56 no and 26 undecided. I know for a fact some people did not vote...sadly because I was one of them. I did not expect the results back as fast as they came and I missed the deadline to vote and that is my own fault. I am happy to see that a staff member or organization took the initiative to take this poll. We were first told if all of HVL doesn't go to this calendar we won't do it. Now I am hearing if the big schools of HVL do it, we will do it. Depending on how admin. reacts to the teacher response, the HVL response and the community response may determine a change or continued culture. I think if there is better communication and direct research to support the change the culture will change about this topic. 5. What impact can you have on the culture in your current setting? What can you do to make it a healthy culture? I try to stay positive and look at both sides of a big decision. I also try to protect my department where nontenured staff is involved. When there are important topics that the nontenured staff have opinions on I try to relay our message so that their voice is still heard. Their opinion still matters even if it is more difficult to speak up as a nontenured staff. The other thing I can do is try to do my own research to get answers to the big decisions. I feel the more discussions we can have about big changes the better things would be. This way we would feel like we as teachers are a part of the change rather than asked to follow the change with no input.