New Year Reflections: Awareness to Implementation
Author: Rick Phelan
Published: 01.06.14
In addition to being an educator, I’m also an elementary school basketball coach. While helping my team get set for a new season, I was struck by the media hype on shoes and what my players thought was essential for them to become excellent players: Nike Air basketball shoes. If you’re going to be a player, you need the right “kicks.”
My adult reflection was, “Wow, don’t the guys understand their ability to be excellent basketball players isn’t REALLY about shoes?” Engaging the team in conversation, they admitted that excellence is more about work: developing shooting and dribbling skills and working as a team on play strategies … though shoes can help.
Stepping back, I wondered if there might be similar suppositions in the world of K-12 education. My thoughts went to professional development activities related to new curriculum and instructional strategies. In our world, the conventional thinking when we have a new curriculum or strategy is that we will become better teachers through professional development.
Thinking more deeply, I recognized that there is a huge difference between awareness and implementation in professional development. Awareness is a generalized idea of how things can be. Implementation is putting ideas into action—and this frequently involves moving outside of our comfort zones into areas where lessons may fail, but there’s also the possibility of learning to serve students more effectively.
As teachers, we can develop awareness about new ideas, but that awareness is similar to my elementary school basketball team’s concept of Nike basketball shoes—nice to have, but action and implementation work is necessary.
Looking to 2014, we see many exciting new initiatives:
- Common Core State Standards articulate and organize K-12 student learning, refining efforts initiated with the 1997 California Standards.
- Smarter Balanced Assessments replace the California STAR assessments to help educators better gauge student progress and ensure learning for all students.
- Educators are developing an understanding of 21st century skills and the importance of communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking.
- Technology is being integrated into all schools as a tool to support learning and teaching.
- Leadership teams are guiding efforts by providing a vision, planning to attain that vision, and allocating resources appropriately.
In support of these changes, educators are being asked to learn new content, pedagogies, and ways of evaluating student learning. Our degree of success will be measured by how we assimilate and activate the information; that is, how we bring it to life in classrooms with students.
One approach to activating awareness is to concentrate on students, asking the question, “How can I apply these ideas to best serve the needs of my students?”
The urgency and importance of a teacher’s work in the 180-day school year cannot to be underestimated. Rita Pierson effectively articulates this idea in her May 2013 TED Talk, Every Kid Needs a Champion, on the importance of teacher-student relationships. The central question in her teaching is how to take students from where they are to where they need to be in nine months.
Pierson teaches a manta to her students: “I am somebody. I was somebody when I came; I’ll will be a better somebody when I leave. I am powerful and strong—I deserve the education that I’m receiving here. I have places to go and things to do.”
The beginning of a new year offers time to take stock and be reflective. As we move forward in transforming our public school system, it’s important to recognize that there’s no substitute for hard work that is laser-focused on the needs of the students in our classrooms.
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