"Learning"

“The greatest threats to normal childhood are the expectations of adults. We must remember that growth is a slow process. Children not only grow but they grow up; and up is a very long distance for all of them”

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Last Friday Cabinet participated in the exit interview related to the third annual Organizational Assessment. Though there are several areas of noteworthy accomplishment and improvement, there remain areas yielding inconsistent, incomplete, or incoherent results. We are anxious to unpack the strengths and threats in greater detail. The exit interview did not include the final report but did have scores for comparison purposes.

Nonetheless, we do know from the scores two words that are the presently the bane of our existence – expectations and implementation.

The existence and subsequent practices of low expectations across our school system, within each school, and within each classroom irrespective of elementary or secondary grade, course, or program continues to limit both our students and staff.

Simply and with great candor, we expect too little from our students and staff. The “we” in the previous sentence extends far beyond the educational community.

Too few citizens from our community believe and expect our students, all students to successfully learn to high standards.

Low expectations are even more egregious within the educational community. Educators that expect little of students as well as themselves commit what President Bush called “soft bigotry”. Strong words.

No one wants to be called or labeled a bigot especially not educators. But, when we expect and accept below standard performance, below standard work, below standard learning simply because of where we live we hurt children.

Shifting expectations is not easy. Several factors influence low expectations. Chief among these is experience – past and current. Because we have expected little, little has been produced reinforcing the belief and practice that students can’t or students won’t.

Our inability to deeply implement practices as well as programs contributes in part to low expectations. The scores from the Organizational Assessment reveal pockets of improvements but these are isolated not ubiquitous. Interestingly enough where improvement was identified the level of implementation coupled with high expectations were found.

Implementation is important.

Deep implementation is critical!

Not surprisingly implementation has been challenging. Implementation requires a sense of humility that starts first with recognition, openness, if you will, to think differently about ones’ own practice.

Humility requires an examination of results attributed to ones’ practice. We know from both personal as well as professional experience that different results don’t come from simply “wishing” or “hoping” they will. Rather they come from a commitment to continuous improvement.

In the weeks and months ahead, the Organizational Assessment will serve as a powerful tool for our learning and improvement. Yet, we know that learning does not take place unless there is application of the information.

Hence, our challenge is to apply the output of the Organizational Assessment as the input for continuous improvement.