I tend to want to bash well-intentioned people who are dragging the movement down. Along with the mental health piece and the non-targeted piece, avoiding doing this is, in my view, a kind of third wheel on the tricycle that we might ride into the 2017-2018 academic year here on the PLC.
I am competitive in nature and sometimes it leads me into places I don’t want to go. If I see someone who unintentionally harms kids or teachers, I get really pissed and want to fight them. But since their actions are unintentional, how is that going to help? They are doing the best they can.
Teachers who defend the use of the textbook and cannot therefore see that they are not aligning with the research or the standards cannot be faulted. They are doing the best they can.
There is an increasing number of district coordinators who are pulling their hair out on this point. They have had it with the old guard. But there are so many of them still left in classrooms that they don’t know what to do.
I just met – via email – one such coordinator from Atlanta last week. These district coordinators questions are about how to bring change to their districts to align with the actual research and standards when there are so many teachers in their district who don’t want to do it, and who actively push back on them, wraith-like.
I want to bash those teachers publicly. But I can’t. It won’t bring about change. I have done a lot of that kind of bashing here of those people over the years and each time that that has happened I should have apologized, or just not done it in the first place.
And we don’t have time for it anyway – the new non-targeted and mental health initiatives requires far too much time already.
The non-targeted piece is very much like this for me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgiQD56eWDk