My teacher friends thought I was crazy to essentially tear up my continuing contract, after 15 years as a science teacher, in order to work for a lower per diem rate as an administrator. However, at that time I began to feel isolated and frustrated in the classroom. I knew that there was great student learning going on in many of my colleagues classrooms as well as my own, but thanks to the current structure of schools that good work was taking place in pockets. Teachers need to be able to work together to learn from each other and share their successes and failures. Reflection on practice is essential, but you can’t be as effective alone. At that time our school district was just beginning to learn about Professional Learning Communities, which emphasizes collaboration, but the push for accountability through testing and political pressures on education stunted the growth of collaboration within our PLCs. I felt if I made the move to administration I would be able to support teachers doing good work while doing my best to shield them from the outside pressures. I strongly felt a change to the system was needed, and that an achievement gap between students of high vs. low socio-economic status was partially present because of the dysfunctional learning environments created by the factory model of public education.
I strongly believe schools should not be compared to a factory because the goal of a school is not to produce identical minimal standard products such as those which factories are designed to produce. Schools should also not be compared to a business because schools are not in the “business” of educating students. Schools are not a profit seeking organization with the ability to bring in more revenue if individual students learn more or if more individuals learn. A better metaphor for schools is that they should be looked at as a greenhouse. In a greenhouse individual organisms are nurtured in an optimal environment with special attention given to specific needs. Some organisms need more water, some need more nutrients, others need more light, but none thrive in darkness. In a greenhouse the organisms are nurtured with the goal for them to leave the greenhouse with strong roots which allow them to anchor into the new environment and contribute to the benefit of all outside of the greenhouse.
As you can see, 15 years of teaching Biology can not easily be ignored, so I would like to propose that the Greenhouse metaphor can further be applied to the student as an individual. If student quantitative outputs such as test scores on the PISA or any other high stakes assessment is the only measure of a student’s success it would be like measuring the health of a plant based solely on the fruit or flowers it produces. In reality, the health of a plant (i.e. the children’s education) is also determined by looking at the plant as a whole including what is under the surface and therefore the roots of the plant play an important role as well.
The roots of the plant are akin to the students’ qualitative outcomes found under the surface. Unlike the student outputs, student outcomes are not easily measured because they are more qualitative in nature: study skills, creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, problem solving, perseverance, courage, empathy and compassion are some of the skills that make up the students “roots”. Schools that function as a greenhouse are committed to focusing on nurturing the “roots” of the students and by default, when these qualitative skills are nurtured the quantitative outputs (test scores) will fall into place. Ultimately the success of any school, like a greenhouse, will be measured by how healthy, how strong, and how “deeply rooted” the students are that leave the school. The school that acts as a greenhouse closes the achievement gap and educates all students by using time as the variable for success not curriculum and minimizes student backgrounds such as socioeconomics.
As a principal of a school run as a greenhouse, I made decision based on three main questions. How will this decision impact student learning? Does this decision support teacher growth? Will this decision promote school improvement? Time, money, and energy were budgeted according to these three questions and if I could not answer in the affirmative for one of the three then my decision was easy...the answer was “no”. This approach to school leadership also meant that our focus was not on our students’ test scores (flowers/fruit of the plant), but rather on students’ ability to complete tasks such as working together to solve problems (roots of the plant). All of the staff needed to be on board and “nurturing our students’ roots” became the new mantra of our school. Teachers embraced this new focus because it is what they believed in from the beginning. The difference was there was a system that was being put in place to support that belief and as a result the school community embraced and valued the greenhouse philosophy.
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