Change CEDu 527

Change is something we were talking about today during our professional growth day. We are starting to look at standards and are in phase 2 looking at technical plans. We spent the afternoon as a department discussing our program and our standards. We are trying to make a cultural school change towards greater collaboration with respect to planning as well as more common summative and formative assessments. We met with our principal and our curriculum coordinator and looking at the map of change toolkit, we have departments all over the map. Some departments are just starting to work together and others use summative and formative assessments daily. Our administration is recognizing that we are all at different points, which is nice. They are not trying to make us conform to the same structure. The readings we had for this week discussed how effective change can take place and what is needed for it to take place. As we change to improve our teaching, we must not forget that this takes time. It can not be something we pull out once a year, only during professional growth days. We need to make commitments to ourselves and our departments and create time lines for our change and implementation of these changes. If we don't we are just "saying" we'll do it, and just doing it so appease our boss. We need to buy into what we are doing and/or make it something we can buy into if we don't agree with the projected outcome. I hope our department can continue to work well together to change for the better.