Asking Hard Questions of Colleagues

Yet another quote from Deborah Meier's book:

Expecting teachers to take responsibility for the success of the whole school requires that they begin to accept responsibility for both their own and their colleagues' teaching.

This made me think of something Ron used to say a lot - "Care enough to confront." He was referring to students, but I think the same thing applies to our colleagues. I think we need to respect our colleagues enough to ask hard questions of them. That's part of what I'm trying to do with this staff development - ask hard questions of each of you (and myself) to make sure we are doing all that we can to make our school a success. I don't think it's okay anymore (if it ever was) to just say "I'm going to close my door and do whatever I want." It's not enough to be successful as individual teachers, we need to be successful as a staff if we want our school to be successful - and if we want our students to be successful and achieve to their potential.

Of course there's a fine line between pushing our colleagues to do their best teaching and conveying the impression that "my way is right, your way is wrong." But I think that's a line we need to walk. I think if we fail to approach the education of our students as an entire staff - with a coherent approach and clear goals for what we want to achieve - we will be mediocre at best. And I guess I'm at the point in my career where I refuse to be mediocre - or part of something that is.

If we intend to dramatically improve the education of American kids, teachers must be challenged to invent schools they would like to teach and learn in, organized around the principles of learning that we know matter.