Effecting School-Wide Change

As a non-tenured teacher, I am very careful whose toes I might be stepping on as I voice my opinions regarding topics for discussion past my immediate classroom design.  I am currently in my tenure year, thus leading to an even more sheltered Mr. Coffed than ever before.  For this reason, I would not consider myself to be meeting my full potential in taking on the role of a science educator leader.  This is the saddest and most unproductive part of the tenure process.  New teachers are told to “keep their mouths shut” for the first three years of their career as to not upset the “wrong people” and therefore not be granted tenure.  This is a messed up process.  Although new teachers may lack the experience that administrators or veteran teachers have, they enter a school with the most up-to-date teaching strategies in their arsenal of tricks, but are consequently told to shelter how much or when they can share them.  I feel very comfortable with my science department and we are quite the collaborative group, so to share these ideas for instruction with them is quite easy for me.  To share information or suggestions for improving instruction past this department, however, is not a comfortable thing for me to do at this time.  In order to sneak in a few suggestions, I rather frequently forward some of my ideas to our principal, who often reviews them and provides some feedback.  I have yet to see her use these ideas, however, and therefore feel as though they are just brushed by the wayside.  Effecting large-scale change in my school will be quite difficult without the support of administration.  If they were to jump on board with some of my suggestions, maybe more teachers would begin to stray from their old ways of teaching and enter a new form that presents high-quality instructional strategies.

What's Our Sputnik?

It is my opinion that Thomas Friedman makes quite a few very solid points in his op-ed entitled, “What’s Our Sputnik?” in The New York Times.  Although the U.S. is making strides towards the incorporation of STEM education practices in classrooms across the nation, we are still far from reaching the achievements that are made in classroom in other locations across the globe (i.e. China, Japan, Taiwan).  The level of improvement is just not equating to progress.  Instead, it seems as though America is just keeping its head afloat and other nations remain steadily ahead of us.  Honestly, I am unsure how to fix this problem.  As Friedman (2010) states, the United States’ primary focus seems to be on war, oil, and encasing itself in other nations’ problems, seemingly unaware of the severity of its own problems.  I agree with Friedman that these areas of influence are definitely concerns that we should be involved in, but our influence is consequently leading to the U.S. becoming, “huge enablers of bad governance” (Friedman, 2010) to other nations. 

Friedman’s strongest point is in his explanation of Taiwan’s improvement plan over the past few years; “they got rich digging inside themselves, unlocking their entrepreneurs, not digging for oil.”  In sum, the U.S. is a very prideful and selfish nation.  We will require another, “huge national effort” to revive our current state, but honestly, I do not see it happening.  The nation itself is greatly divided, far too political, and still far too selfish to truly care enough to do something about its steady decline.  A revolution in education, science, and infrastructure is required in order to get back on track and I feel as though it might be too late to reverse the effects that the past 50 years or so have had on us.  Is a change possible?  Yes, I would hope so.  I just recognize that the change would more than likely need to begin with enforcement from the government and, given the struggles that the Obama administration is having getting cooperation from Congress and the House because of the divide amongst those men, such enforcement is not likely to come down the line.