There are two articles in the Las Vegas papers today about the success of empowerment schools. In addition to the key ingredient of empowering teachers in empowerment schools, such innovations as teaching students based on ability levels instead of chronological age appears to be extremely effective.
Teachers should be correctly concerned about the perversion of empowerment as a label to empower weak principals to micromanage instead of empowering secure principals to pass on the freedom to teachers.
Empowerment schools, if done right, could weed out the small minded administrative control freaks and replace them with true education leaders. I say only “could” because districts in Nevada have a natural inclination of twisting good ideas into merde.
Given the Peter Principal is the norm in school districts, the biggest challenge for empowerment is finding qualified principals, not teachers.
Comments (2)
Your last paragraph is certainly true. At my elementary school, we have a new principal with only 4 years of teaching experience. Does he qualify to tell teachers with 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 years experience how to run their classrooms? His immaturity and incompetence has only reinforced the teachers' outlook to not take him seriously. As a result, we do not have a "team/family" motivating force towards educating our students.
Posted by Derek | July 5, 2007 3:04 PM
"...teaching students at their ability level instead of chronological age..."
EXCUSE ME ALL TO PIECES---that is called "grouping"! When I taught elementary school, I pre-tested each student individually with an "Informal Reading Inventory" to determine their reading levels. Then I grouped them--according to that level. Nothing was set in stone, and students were retested every two months and moved to other groups as they progressed. I usually had 4 reading groups--met with each one daily during a 80 minute time block with students rotating--round robin--thru 3 other "stations" when not with me in a directed reading lesson. Usually had 2 groups for math.
When I moved up from elem. to middle school science, I again, pre-tested each kid (all 170 of them with an IRI) to get ability/reading levels since my text books were written at a high 7th /low 8th grade level and this was 6th grade Life Science Class! Again, not grouping as in elem--but grouping none the less with seating arrangements so high & low ability levels were mixed at the tables for labs.
...TEACHING AT ABILITY LEVELS...--I've only been doing this for 35 years!!! As I said, it's called GROUPING!!!
Sophie
Posted by Sophie | July 17, 2007 5:13 AM