I think the word of the week for me is CONNECTIONS. I have been amazed as I "researched" what to research how many different ways things are connected. Teacher morale is connected to how empowered they feel. Empowering teacher leaders can positively impact student performance. Too often student performance is negatively affected by discipline assignments. The ramifications of change in one small area can be huge!
During a phone conversation with my assistant principal, we discussed how to close achievement gaps with some of our low performing students who often are at the lower socio-economic end of the spectrum. As we discussed different ways to address the gaps, we kept coming back to the same problem - what do you do about the students who are in ISS or another alternative assignment for discipline? This same issue kept popping up, so we decided that my action research project should focus on discipline and effective alternatives to ISS assignments. Both of us felt that if we could effectively discipline students without negatively impacting their performance, then we would address so many other issues: from closing our achievement gap to teacher morale. It will be interesting to see what other schools have done or tried and even to see what teachers think will be effective.
No comments:
Post a Comment