Saturday, April 13, 2013

Vision or Model?

I've started taking courses for my Master's Degree this week, and I'm hoping it helps breath some new life in to this blog. The seminar I am in right now is on school reform, and the first book we are reading is "Tinkering Toward Utopia" by David Tyack & Larry Cuban. One quote about the way to go about school reform struck me:
“Instead of being ready-made plans, reform policies could be stated as principles, general aims, to be modified in the light of experience, and embodied in practices that vary by school or even by classroom."
 This seems to be the way we are going about customized learning in my district. A vision has been established and some professional development has been provided to the staff (though we could always use more). From there, we have been expected to figure out how it best looks in our individual classrooms and schools.

My question for you is do you agree with the authors, or do you agree with many of my current colleagues who believe that this asking too much of us as a staff? Should we be given a vision or a model?

I'd opt for the former simply because I want control over what happens in my classroom and I don't want to move towards anything being canned. Changing the status quo will always result in some uneasiness, and perhaps that's even more true when you force the status quo to change itself.