Tuesday, September 25, 2012
CEDO 565 - Leadership - Week 5
This week we continued "The Game". It was supposed to emulate Years 2-3 in the planning process of accomplishing some bigger picture items in a school district. Even though we had learned a lot from playing the game in the prior class, we still ran into some unforeseen problems. We still had issues with the sequence of the planning process. Just when we thought we were prepared for something, the game would make us go back and revisit something we had already done. We also noticed that the people with a negative attitude pretty much stayed that way and it was more of a pain than it was worth to include them in any of the big decisions. The consensus was that we keep moving without them and they will either hop on board, or leave. The choice was theirs. It was a little frustrating to have to keep going back and talking to people before allowing us to advance but perhaps that was the point that the game was trying to make. The bigger a school district is, the more and more red tape you'll have to go through. The more committees and planning groups you may have, the longer it will take to gather information and get decisions done. There is no perfect answer, just some hints for effective practices and putting the right people in the right places to accomplish goals in the quickest and most efficient way possible.
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I can only imagine what a large district is like to work with and in. The private ESL school I worked at in Taiwan had 16 schools but they were mostly clones of each other and not a big district in the sense of a large public school system. As much as I know there is a lot of red tape and hurdles in a large district, small independent schools have a different set of conditions to work with.
ReplyDeleteIn some respects, the overhead of work to do remains the same whether a school is large or small. The same forms and reports need to be filed and submitted somewhere to someone. Whereas a large district might have a lot more manpower to accomplish the same type of overhead, a small school may only have one person who has to do the same thing plus a slew of other responsibilities (yes, that's me).
The same goes for a change process. A large district may have a department team write a new curriculum. A small private school probably has one teacher per grade/high school subject. There's not a lot of collaboration, brainstorming and combined years of experience on a one person team. Yes, teachers can discuss across grades and disciplines but it's just not the same.
I don't think size makes it any more or less difficult, only that the nature of the difficulties are different.