Joel Zehring

As a brand-new school this year, our staff has to develop a vision and a mission for our school. Now, I’ve been involved in big-picture conversations with teachers in several districts and if I may say, it’s about as frustrating as trying to run up a wall greased with oil.

Teachers are notorious for small-picture thinking. And in the classroom, that’s a good thing. Teachers need to be focused on the minutia of students’ academics, behavior, health, and attendance. It takes a highly trained eye focused by years of experience to meet individual student needs. Often, a teacher’s carefully trained eye looks at the big picture and begins picking out little issues and problems. From there any meeting or discussion about vision takes a nose dive real quick:

“Our district has never provided enough help for ESL students, I had a student a couple years ago…”

“I emailed technology about our printers, but they never responded back. Whoever is working up there needs to…”

“The state gives us so many tests and assessments. I never have time to teach.”

These may be valid points that need to be addressed, but public education will not progress if classroom educators are exclusively concerned with complaining about individual annoyances and putting out existing fires. Vision requires a healthy dose of optimism and balanced knowledge of where we’ve come from so that we can determine where we want to go.

Unfortunately, the discussion is often dead in the water after a couple of rants from over-worked teachers. The participants decide they need something on paper (usually for some sort of performance-based pay bonus), so the vision turns into a list of educational buzz words like research-based, rigorous, supportive, engaging, success, etc. Seriously, take a look at any district website and you will see one of these words. These aren’t bad words, but like any word that’s overused, these words have lost their impact and their meaning has wilted.

Here’s hoping our school can create a vision worth achieving.