Adult Relationships
In an article entitled “Improving Relationships Within the Schoolhouse” published in the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development’s The Best of Educational Leadership 2005-06, Roland Barth tackles the issue of improving relationships between the adults in a school. Barth states that “The nature of relationships among the adults within a school has a greater influence on the character and quality of a school and on student accomplishment than anything else. However, educators rarely discuss the matter of how adults interact in schools because the topic is too volatile.”
He goes on to describe four types of relationships that he has observed in schools:
· Parallel Play – where educators work in isolation from one another.
· Adversarial Relationships – these can involve open combat, the more subtle withholding of information and competition for scarce resources and recognition.
· Congenial Relationships – relationships that are personal and friendly and lay the groundwork for the most elusive and desirable of relationships—collegiality.
· Collegial Relationships – these are relationships that create a culture of collegiality where educators talk about their practice, share knowledge, observe one another in their classrooms and root for one another's successes.
He goes on to describe the research of Judith Little, who found that school leaders foster collegiality when they:
- state expectations clearly
- model collegiality
- reward those who behave as colleagues
- protect those who engage in these collegial behaviors
You can read the entire article by going to Improving Relationships Within The Schoolhouse.
End of the PD Year
Remember that the professional development year runs from July 1 to June 30. That means your teachers should complete their required professional development hours by June 30. If your district does not have a flexible PD calendar, then PD should have been completed prior to the closing day of school in order for teachers to meet the 2006-07 185-day contractual obligations. Also, remember that professional development activities may begin for the 2007-08 year after all closing activities are completed for the current school year, provided the district is on a flexible calendar.
Another important thing to remember is that you cannot mandate that new teachers, whose contracts don’t begin until after July 1, to complete PD training before that date. A district could recommend that any teachers hired before July 1 attend any training occurring prior to July 1, but attendance would be at the teachers’ discretion.
Finally, remember that any new employee activities you schedule, such as new employee orientation, would count towards those teachers’ 187-day minimum contract and would require the schools where they worked to have flexible professional development calendars. In other words, unless the orientation occurred on a day already in the school calendar (we recommend doing it on opening day), staff attending the new employee activities must either be allowed to count those days toward their 187-day contractual obligation or be compensated for the additional time. If you did not compensate them for the new employee activities that occurred outside the district calendar, you couldn’t ask them to attend all four days designated in your calendar for professional development.
Quotable Quotes
“Each time another person in the organization embraces the vision and passes it on; it’s like giving the vision ‘fresh legs’.”
John Maxwell