We must know when to lovingly confront administrators and when not to. It’s the only way. Not only do we have to teach our classes and all the other things we do in our buildings, we have to re-educate not just our students but also the people we work for. And to do that we need to have boundaries so that we know when to go into re-education mode with them. Good boundaries in a teacher allow us to clearly decide in an instant when to fight and when to ignore.
My approach, and it has worked for me better than any other, is to literally run after the observing administrator assigned to me for that year, the one who does my yearly evaluation, whenever I see them in the hallway. I always have ready for them when I see them a printout of one of the Primer articles (hard link above) that we have collected here over the years.
I chase them every chance I can at the beginning of the year, just to hand them the articles I want them to read. Most of the ones I chose are the ones above by Robert Harrell. Those are the best. I also set up, in my classroom in Invisibles Hub C, an armchair next to the armchair of Teacher 2 to my left so that when the admin drops in (usually in snake mode but I stop that), they can’t slink to the back of the room and get on their cell phone when they come into my classroom.
I make them sit with the students so that they have to actually participate in the class so that they can feel the power of what we are doing. I like them to feel stupid and the kids love it majorly. A third thing I do is aggressively send them those Primer articles as attachments in August and September. I thus double down on the articles, handing them to them in the hall but also sending them as emails.
