Seeing with New Eyes
By Rick DuFour
Journal of Staff Development, Fall 1997 (Vol. 18, No. 4)I once told a very opinionated friend that I wished that I was as sure of anything as he seemed to be about everything. The certainty that we have discovered the truth or the one right way is a major barrier to change for both individuals and organizations.
The personnel in schools that function as professional learning communities are not only willing to subject their assumptions, beliefs, and practices to continuous examination, but are also willing to consider the perspective of others. Becoming a learning community is a task of discovery, and as Marcel Proust wrote, "The real art of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes."
One strategy for helping principals and teachers develop their capacity to "see with new eyes" is to ask them to consider contemporary criticism of schools and honestly assess their schools in light of those criticisms.
Excerpts from a variety of works that have found fault with public education are displayed in Table 1. Assess each of those statements in terms of its accuracy in describing conditions in your school using the scale at the top of the table.
If each faculty member of a school was asked to complete this survey and then discuss the results with his or her colleagues, several things could be accomplished. Teachers could be considering the perspectives of others. They could identify discrepancies in their own perceptions of how the school operates and explore the basis of those differences. They could discover consensus regarding the areas that are most in need of improvement in their school. It is this kind of dialogue that helps educators develop their capacity to function as a professional learning community.
TABLE 1
Critiques of Public Education
Use the following scale to rate the statements listed below.
________________________________________________
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
We are not at We are somewhat We are very much
all like this like this like this
I. Schools and Change
_______ A. Schools are not organized to respond to the needs and interests of students. They are bureaucratic monopolies that rely on a captive audience for customers. There are few incentives–and fewer rewards–to improve.
_______ B. The issue is not that individual teachers and schools do not innovate and change all the time. They do. The problem is that the change is unproductive, focusing at the margins of practice rather than the core of teaching and learning.
_______ C. From the perspective of teachers, much of school life is an endless cycle of first implementing and then abandoning new initiatives. Teachers are left with the impression that the system doesn’t know what it is doing.
_______ D. For teachers, the whole concept of change becomes a matter of coping with management’s penchant for educational fads.
II. Teaching
_______ A. Teachers believe it is their job to teach, but it is the student's job to learn. Thus, they are responsible for teaching, but not for learning.
_______ B. Typical classroom instruction is dominated by "teacher talk." Teachers work very hard, and students sit passively and watch them work.
_______ C. Teachers work in isolation. There is little opportunity for serious professional collegiality in which teachers share ideas, observe each other teaching, or assist each other in professional development.
III. Curriculum
_______ A. The typical school curriculum is overloaded with trivia. Schools cannot do what they should be doing as long as they continue to do what they are doing.
_______ B. There is typically no uniform school curriculum. Students studying the same subject with different teachers in the same school often are exposed to content and experiences that are vastly different.
_______ C. Subjects are taught in isolation with little effort made to connect content from different subjects into some meaningful conceptual framework.
_______ D. Schools typically have no meaningful curricular goals. They focus on means (materials, programs, instructional arrangements, etc.) rather than ends–student outcomes.
_______ E. Because they are fuzzy on the outcomes they are trying to achieve, schools are typically unable to offer valid evidence that they are achieving their intended purpose (i.e., student learning).
_______ F. Teachers have not collectively identified the criteria by which they will assess student work.
_______ G. The inability to establish a results orientation means procedures for continuous improvement do not exist in schools.
IV. Structure
_______ A. Schools have no structure. They are a convenient location for a bunch of individual teachers, like independent contractors, to come to teach discrete groups of students.
_______ B. Schools have no infrastructures to support teacher collaboration in attacking schoolwide problems. Teachers, like their students, carry on side-by-side with similar but essentially separated activities.
_______ C. Schools are structured as top-down bureaucratic hierarchies with heavy reliance on rules for teachers who, behind their classroom doors, can readily ignore much of the top-down direction.
Rick DuFour is superintendent of Adlai Stevenson High School District 125, Two Stevenson Dr., Lincolnshire, IL 60069, (847) 634-4000, ext. 268, fax (847) 634-0239, (e-mail: rdufour@district125.k12.il.us).
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