*Brittney,I am interested in your answer and how much trust you have in your school system. To have control so much in the classroom means that the principal trusts you completely. My question is, what happens when that trust is not well placed?Certainly, we would all like complete freedom to run our classroom exactly how we want to, but what happens when we cannot show results? What happens when the way we want to run the classroom starts impacting students negatively? Where is the point that a staff member should be fired?I am struggling with this now with a colleague at my school. This teacher, I am convinced, does not teach here is how I know: - Results - Her music programs do not show evidence of vocal training or pitch control. Basic concepts, such as using your head voice instead of your chest voice, show no evidence of being taught.- Results - Students who I acquire from her classes lack understanding of basic music terminology: note values, lyrics, pitch, singing voice, rhythm.- Direct Observation - I walk by or in her classroom at least 2 times a week at varying times of day and there is 100% always a Youtube music video showing or there is a sub playing a movie on Netflix.- Reports - students, unprompted, have talked to me about how little is done in her classes and that the little they picked up in the class came from packets she handed out students to complete on their own.In my first two years of teaching their, I tried desperately to collaborate with her on teaching. I offered to help, I offered suggestions, we came up with a plan to bring choir back. Every time when rubber hit the road, she had an excuse for why she couldn’t do whatever she needed to do. The excuses range from understandable to fear driven postering.Her OTES scores are just fine because she teaches music and we can make our SLOs anything because administrators do not understand our subject at all. Her observations are good because they are announced and administrators don’t know what a music classroom should look like.So my question is, as an administrator, how do you balance giving control to teachers with accountability so this doesn’t happen in your building. I know accountibilites exist where trust does not. I want to trust my teachers because that makes everyone’s life easier and better for the most part, but I cannot happen in a building I supervise. What do you do? What measures can you put in place that help with this? What’s do I do to both allow for flexibility yet have a radar up for teachers who were miss-hires? I don’t believe anyone went into this profession not wanting to help children, but I am also not naive enough to think everyone will act with the same integrity toward teaching.I am very interested in hearing a veteran principal’s approach in how they walk the line between a professional structure and authoritarian structure.------------------------------Brittney's Original Message:The professional structure most closely resembles that of my school. Professional structure relies on highly trained professionals to carry out their own work. Although this professional structure has bureaucratic tendencies, in that large-scale decision making is typically centralized, the principal, it is not entirely bureaucratic. This professional structure is far less machine like in that professional ultimately have the ability to make informed decisions, because there is not complete centralized control. For example, at my school we have a lot of freedom when it comes to pacing our instruction. At the beginning of each school year our principal has us submit our pacing chart but does not dictate the outcome of the pacing chart so long as we have one. We are trained and knowledgeable professionals, and he believes we are capable of structure our own instruction. In that is just one example of many of how my school resembles professional structure. The authoritarian structure least resembles that of my school. In an authoritarian structure the leader dictates all the decisions and assumes complete control over all procedures. This type of structure does not allow for subordinates to make any decisions either for themselves or for the organization. This structure is not at all like my school, often my principal includes teachers in decision making, and never dictates what occurs in our classrooms, so long as we follow curriculum, maintain behavior, and carry out our basic duties. Like I previously stated, we are treated as professionals that are capable of making informed decisions. There are few organizations that the authoritarian structure would be beneficial, however a school is not one. * *Nicholas Turon* Director of Bands Paint Valley Local Schools nicholas.turon at gmail.com (740)-816-8266 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: < http://listserv.ohio.edu/pipermail/ous-lp-rp13/attachments/20180618/cdf24f6f/attachment-0001.html >
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