Excellent Teacher Discussion

Yet another day full of surprises! The meeting today at school was to receive an already written mission statement from the school-pastor leadership. Every school accrediting association in the world will tell you that the mission statement has no chance of sucess if it comes from the top down. You can not hand a staff a mission statement. Sooooo, I raised the question in the meeting about who was the author of the mission statement. Apparently it was one dusted off from a number of years ago.
I simply made the point that as good as it might be, it has no chance of taking root because there was obviously no ownership. As soon as I raised this question (bucked the hand down approach) the teacher group changed and there was some considerable discussion about the wording. Finally, it was decided to come back at a later meeting to work on the wording. What a change in attitude by the staff!
This meeting was followed by an hour and a half meeting at our home regarding the discipline policy (or lack there of). We used a structured question approach written out. Without this structure a meeting would be like herding cats. An excellent discussion was held with another meeting set for next week to begin hammering out the details of a discipline policy.
I also used a crude diagram of the parts of school operations. The staff was amazed at the full picture of school operations. Most had copied the diagram from the board and one teacher translated the parts of school operations into Spanish. All in all, it was an excellent meeting. Clearly new ground was broken in that teachers were actually having to work through their own situation.