Anne Jolly's Diary Entries 46 - 50

Standing in the Dust In her "real" life, Anne Jolly is an eighth-grade science teacher at Cranford Burns Middle School. She is taking a year away from the classroom to design and implement a site-based professional development process for middle school teachers. This diary chronicles Anne's ups and downs as she goes through the process of developing this initiative, known as the "Impact Project." In this set of diary entries Anne recounts some insights she's obtained from an unlikely source.

Diary Entries 46 - 50

Entry 46: Now, I don't think for a minute that the movie, "Groundhog Day," was designed to elicit deep philosophical insights. The plot was engagingly simple. Every morning the hero kept waking up in the same day over and over, and he had to keep living that same day until he got it right. Predictably, at first he kept making the same old mistakes. "You wouldn't have to keep waking up in the same day over and over again if you would just get it right, dummy!" I smugly chided the hero as I munched on buttered popcorn from my comfortable theater seat. "Just take the blinders off! It's obvious what you're doing wrong!"

My smugness has long since disappeared with the uncomfortable realization that I am actually a part of that movie, along with students, teachers, parents, and my entire community. I woke up this morning, picked up the paper and read the headlines. Deja vu. A ten million dollar shortfall in education dollars has jolted our school system. Budget cuts are going to hit the classroom. Along with other cutbacks, the model middle school program is on the chopping block. The ax may fall on the progress we've made in developing programs and initiatives to address the needs of these kids in the middle. When the sun rose this morning, my community waked to discover that we're going to have to live through this whole thing over again.

I stomped to the car to leave for school and mentally reviewed some projected casualties for the schools I work with. Teacher conversations around teaching and learning. Collaboration around practices that work to support identified student needs - the stuff of which the Impact Teams are made. Teaching teams with common planning times. Kids and teachers who formed their own communities within schools and experienced greater success. Middle schools are already identified as the "weak link" in education. Are we really going to go back to the junior high model with its documented failures to produce the kinds of teaching situations and student learning that we need?

Entry 47: At school, I glanced through the team's logs. Team 9 at Burns has changed directions with their Impact Team meetings. They plan to make students better readers and writers by improving student motivation, and have already started researching that topic. I like the "soul searching" process they're engaged in to find out what will help them and their students most. Team 1 wins the "dedication award." They plan to stay after school and work an hour each Monday that we don't have faculty meeting. They value this collaborative process and want more uninterrupted time. Team 4 is completing a web page for publishing their students' writing. They also met in the records room to examine student records and determine what documentation was available on students who have reading difficulties.

At school #2, Team A has developed an ongoing love affair with latest research on writing. They are reading and discussing up to three articles a week, and have made copies of everything they've read for me to share with Burns teachers. Team B gathered around a computer last week to research information about student writing on the internet. They examined the Gold Files and ordered several sets of research articles on student writing.

Talk about a cost-effective way to sustain ongoing professional development and support! What a variety of effective approaches to improving student achievement in reading and writing! A genuine teacher collaboration process can be worth it's weight in gold - especially in a system which has no funding for professional development. And this model middle school program provides the organizational structure which facilitates this kind of teacher growth.

Entry 48: Today I wore my "teacher's hat" at a meeting of six principals and three administrators. I marvel at their ability to be upbeat and to plan productively. All of them face major cutbacks - some potentially devastating - and still they keep their focus on improving their schools. To a person, they expressed a desire for the system to get to a place where all decisions at the local school and the system level are based on teaching and learning. They are interested in schools where the staff engages in professional engagement and collaboration (the reason I was invited, I suspect). And, they want a protected instructional atmosphere for teachers. Yes! I was ready to do an impromptu tap dance on the conference table when I heard that! Also on their Top Ten list, - a culture in which the whole school, at all levels, is about the business of learning. Y' know, principals and administrators definitely have some redeeming qualities!

Entry 49: I wore one of those ear-to-ear grins as I handed my principal copies of agendas he had prepared for the faculty meetings we've had this year. On each agenda I had highlighted the items pertaining to instruction. In September, he included one item focusing on instruction near the end of the meeting. By January, instruction was the top item on the faculty meeting agenda, and occupied the majority of the time. Instead of a typical faculty meeting in which a principal drones out a list of fussy "Thou shalts" and "Thou shalt nots," our faculty meetings begin with teams taking turns presenting best practices and student work samples. The principal remarks on the good instructional things he observes going on in the school. The few business matters he mentions come at the end.

As the principal glanced through the highlighted agendas, he grinned too - in genuine surprise! He had not set out to deliberately change the total focus of these after-school meetings which teachers normally tolerate, at best. It came about as naturally as a result of the school focus on becoming a "learning community." What a productive spin-off!

Entry 50: So what are we going to do? Will the system cut teacher allocations in such a way as to mean a return to the old junior high school model - the same outdated model that didn't work before? Will we keep doing things the same old way - over and over? One of these days we have to get it right. In that great philosophical movie, Groundhog Day, the hero painstakingly eliminated his mistakes and - bingo! He woke up in tomorrow! Just one day, before I'm too old to stand in front of a classroom, I want to wake up and see the sun rise on tomorrow.

Index of diary entries