School Based Planning and Programming

It is more than a cliché to say that it takes a village to raise a child.  It is self-evident in today's world.  It is also a truism to acknowledge that in any family, a child is well served when both parents sing the same song from the same playbook.  We've all had times in our lives when we've had to get something from our parents and tried to play one off against the other.  I won't even talk about the dynamics in my own family when something required my mother and father to consider a course of action for one of their sons.  Suffice it to say that when more than one adult is required to guide a child, both adults had better be singing the same song.  If they are not, it leads to confuse for the child / adolescent and undermines the relationship between parent and child.  Roland Barth, a well known educator and researcher,  in his seminar work Improving Schools From Within, attempted to make the same points when it came to schools. He argued that school improvement had to begin from within, when all the members of a staff worked together and pulled together to improve the learning for all their students.  In another book he advocates for a learning community where the community becomes the locus of improvement for the school and all its learners.  Now, more than two decades later, that argument still has to be made anew.  In Leading for Differentiation: Growing Teachers Who Grow Kids, (ASCD, 2015) differentiated instruction expert Carol Ann Tomlinson and change leadership authority Michael Murphy lay out the reflective thinking and action-oriented steps necessary to launch a system of continuous professional learning, culture building, and program assessment that will allow differentiation to flourish in every classroom. One has to see this new offering in the same light as the earlier writings referred to above by Barth.  It is obvious and self-apparent that, in a school, everyone has to be working towards the same goal if a difference is to be made in the learning curves of students. When students go from grade to grade in any given school, if priorities differ from one teacher to the next, then there is disjointedness in the learning journeys of the students making it harder for deep learning to occur over time.  I used to have my teacher education students work through a simulation whereby they had to plan a day-long in-service for teachers to talk about literacy and how it was to be enhanced throughout the school. It was a school-based program of enhancement and they were required to think of all the stakeholders in the school as having a role to play, whether that be the principal, the classroom teacher, the caretaker or the secretary. In a school, everyone has to sing the same song.  If students go from one grade to the next and the expectations and priorities are very different in two classrooms, then students will be confused and not know how to decide what is important. WE have to make those decisions for them, at least in terms of the over-all priorities of the program.  Barth draws our attention to the fact that teachers need to talk amongst themselves and agree on what those priorities are to be. Without that ongoing dialogue, then there will be no heading in the same direction from grade to grade and students will either hit or miss their learning goals. Nothing can be more important than school-wide decision making.  This goes for program, curriculum, discipline, and leadership.