For many years now, the work of the School Reform Initiative has been central to my work professionally and to the schools in which I work. The organization’s core practice of helping schools to strengthen their capacity for “educators to build trust, take risks, and surface assumptions and insights about the students they serve by looking regularly and carefully at authentic student and adult work” has helped us to collaborate more productively at ANCS, and it’s also through the work of SRI practices that many educators at schools involved in the CREATE teacher residency program come together.
I found a recent blog post by SRI’s executive director, Kari Thierer, to be so perfect at capturing much of what is wrong (and what is right) about how we approach supporting our teachers in America today. Here’s an especially powerful excerpt:
In education, more and more companies are offering the quick fix; the right curriculum; the right behavior management system; the perfect staff evaluation tool; the ideal lesson plan template. This leads to the ‘imposter syndrome’ feeling so many of us experience, the feeling of inadequacy and lack of expertise. It is extremely disregarding and damaging to tell educators that teaching can be easy if you just have the right tool/curriculum/mindset. Saying anything less than the fact that teaching is a complex enterprise is disrespectful to the educators who are working hard every day to help their students.
We need to give each other permission to not have all the answers. Things are going to fall apart, you are going to have bad days, students are not going to get what you are trying to teach, and you are going to feel incompetent. That’s part of the job. There are no quick fixes, and to do our best work, we must collaborate and support one another, and we must learn from what is going well.
Rather than read a post of mine this week, read the whole post by Kari. And, if you are an educator here in Atlanta, one way you can learn more about SRI is by contacting us here at ANCS and/or by attending their annual national meeting that is happening this year in Atlanta in November.