Principal's Message 11/3/08

CREATING INDEPENDENT THINKERS

The walkthrough with Dr. Marcia Lyles was quite informative. Not only has she been a part of the Department of Education of New York City for so many years, her passion for helping the children of our great city is evident in everything she does. She knows good instruction from being in the classroom, supporting a principal, running her own school, and being a superintendent to name some positions she has been. She has visited so many schools ranging from the very best to the worst. When she speaks, you have no choice to listen. If you don’t, you are passing up an opportunity to get better as a professional in the world of education.

She enjoyed her visit tremendously. She mentioned how great the school looked and was impressed with the tone of the building. I thanked her for her great compliments but I was anxious to know the real feedback on how the school could continue to grow. She said a few recommendations but the one that stood out the most was the mention of not seeing much evidence of the development of independent thinkers. I immediately wrote this down. I pondered for a moment to figure out what she meant without probing first. So many ideas ran through my head of what this could look like. She offered what would be evidence to her if she were to visit a classroom. The images she mentioned consisted of turning a classroom into a resource center for our students. She also spoke of the students using the information we share with them to develop their own conjectures.

USING THE CLASSROOM TO ASSIST

Turning our classrooms into resource centers…This can be done on so many levels. To begin with, as mentioned previously, we begin to communicate a range of level of work so the students have a clearer idea of what strong student work looks like and what does not. Maybe when the school struggled daily with discipline, we developed a notion that posting student work does not help in getting students to reach their capacity. To be honest, I was not interested in looking at what students were producing in their classrooms when I addressed issues in the hall, removed a child from a classroom, or broke up a fight. I hardly think the students were very curious to read each other’s work at the time as well. Now that those things do not happen on a regular basis, I can stop in a classroom and read the latest piece created by our students. I love how anxious they are to share. It can be said there is a high probability a student will look at the work posted especially if a teacher refers to it on a regular basis. “Take a look at what Jamal did with his opening paragraph. It will give you a good idea how to start off.” Regardless, if a student walked in your room, would they know what is expected of him or her as far as writing a paragraph or responding to a word problem? What does it look like to show work or reply to an open ended question? Would they know how to find the main idea of a paragraph?

If an adult walked into your classroom, would they know what great student work looks like in your classroom? Would it be clear what is expected of your students academically? Or would they only know what is expected of them according to the day-to-day procedures? In order to create an independent thinker, we need to provide the opportunity for students to use other resources besides the teacher to find the answers to questions. This will eventually teach them how to be resourceful and will allow for the teacher to be more of a facilitator than an ice skater trying to reach every space in a room. Independent thinkers will be more anxious to answer an open ended question than a student who only has to raise his or her hand to get the answer he or she wants or to narrow down the paragraph to the sentence or two of where the answer lies.

Birthdays:
Jim Unger November 14th
Kristy Willis November 19th

Quote:
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."
--Sir Arther Conan Doyle