SLA

Sorry for not posting for quite a while.

At SLA we have gotten quite used to people dropping by to ask us questions and generally poke around. In fact it is one of our missions to be a demonstration school. One of the people who has been studying us for her dissertation is Cristina Alvarez who is evaluating decision making at SLA. Below is a question that she asked us to respond to and my answer.

Question:

Regarding the decisions you make as a team, during the weekly faculty meetings, what is the impact you feel you are having on the development of the school and on the students?

I certainly feel that we are invested as stakeholders and as such feel empowered to bring others (primarily students) into the process of making the school work. From that standpoint I think that the relations we have with the school’s “Administration” is beneficial for the community. (I use quotes because I never actually think of Chris as administration in the same way that I viewed the principal’s, deans and headmasters of my former schools.)

It is difficult to tell how much of this empowerment actually happens at SLA faculty meetings because I sort of feel that outside of the curricular planning and assessment activities, meetings simply keep everyone on the same page. Most of us already know 80% of the announcements and policy changes from floating in and out of Chris’s office, speaking with one another directly or, more likely than not, Moodle postings. The flow of information is not somehow restrained and then fed to us in faculty meetings.

One of the things that this brings up is the role of control and whether teachers only need to know some things and not others. My view at the moment is that restricting information on a need-to-know basis seems to be more important for an administrator’s piece of mind rather than the smooth governance of the school. After all, the more people who know about a problem the more ideas and resources the school has at its disposal to handle situations. There is not just the practical benefit of more brains working on a particular problem, but the growing confidence that comes to a faculty that is trusted and expected to contribute to the school. I think that we as faculty members make better decisions exactly because we are trusted with a tremendous amount of responsibility and not separated from critical information.

The message from a top-down management structure that ladles out responsibility to faculty members in small doses is that teachers cannot handle the true nature of the world. Quite amazing, really, when Truth is what we are supposed to convey to our kids both in the curriculum and through our daily actions with them.