| This was a school/school district. The common concern was lack of direction and changing direction with new change initiative one/two/three/four times per year. We created an initiative for teacher created and led professional development. We used students for live class recreations where teachers could analyze in real time. It was coordinated, structured, and sequenced in a way no teacher's in our district had experienced. At the same time we took all of the feedback we got from every teacher we interviewed (and we interviewed all of them) and created a vision statement for both teachers and students. We took it back to the teachers and showed how each person's feedback was reflected in the vision. We got the district to adopt the vision. Then we held leadership's feet to the fire and didn't let them do anything that didn't align with the vision. We put the onus on them to explain how any decisions did align. We used the vision to design professional development, adopt curriculum, craft special education services, and more. This started as a K-6 initiative, which was wildly ambitious at the time. In the following years the middle school got on board, and then the high school followed suit, led not by administrators but by the teachers themselves. Something we never in our wildest dreams thought would happen. Five years on the direction is the same and positive change continues. |