Dan Wu - “These are our students.”
DAN WU
The challenge that we chose in our group was, we needed to shift the thinking that these are my students to that these are all our students in the school. And the gap that we faced was: we need to change the beliefs and understandings and attitudes of our teachers.
To put it in context, some of our teachers at the school believe that the ELL learners who were integrated in their classrooms were not their responsibility. Rather, the responsibility of the ELL teacher. I need to change those beliefs and attitudes of these teachers to, again, these are my students from, the shift from “these are my students” to “these are all our students.”
So some of the practical advice and leadership practices, we came up was: we looked at having discussions with the whole staff first, to see where we wanted all our students to be and how we need to get there. We believe that the ownership needed to come from the teachers themselves and [that we didn't need to tell them] that they had to believe in this way.
We also looked at building partnerships and relationships with the ELL parents. And we looked at research to see where it was happening effectively right now. So looking at effective practices, it could be things such as demonstration classes in our board, and/or possibly conducting our own action research within the old context of our school. Finally, we discussed embedding PD in the school and that could be in the forms of book studies, or networks of families of schools, and the whole notion of distributed leadership, giving the opportunity for coaching and mentoring for all leaders on staff.