The following is my take on an article that was in the Fall 2012 issue of American Educator, page 24-33.

The authors started out researching successful schools in high-risk areas to see why they were effective.  They discovered the principals to these schools were “It Can Be Done” leaders, and continued to break down what made those people so successful.  The thing that really stuck out to me (and this is really just common sense) was that the best principals were first teachers, and were teachers for the majority of their career.  This allowed them to see what it was like on the other side of the desk, and they did it long enough that they remembered what it was like to teach once they “got to the top”, so to speak.

The other major thing that stuck out to me was that these successful principals never stopped thinking of themselves as teachers – they were just changing their target audience and thus became a teacher of teachers.

It made me think of my previous schools, and my previous colleagues, and wondering what their reaction of the article would be.  I imagined who would read it and say, “Ugh! This is just more of that Thoughtful Ed, waste of my time, crap!”  I also thought of who would read it and immediately take the cop-out response of, “Well, I’d love for our administration to do things like this, but they won’t so, whatever.”  I feel like there are some times we act just like our students – defeatist, tired, comfortable.  We complain when our students don’t know basic things, yet throw our hands up and play the blame-game saying “Well, they just can’t be taught.”  Bull.  That’s when I turn into one of those cop-out people and say “I wish our administrators were one of these It Can Be Done leaders, but…”

I need to learn to stand up to my colleagues and call them out on some of this stuff.  However, I hate feeling patronized when they retort with “Oh, you haven’t been teaching for 15, 20, 30 years…you’ll see.”  I hope I never become complacent in my teaching.  I always want to be reevalutating my methods and asking myself if I’m being an effective teacher for each particular classroom.  No one is perfect, and we can all learn from each other, no matter how many years of experience we have.