Teachers as Classroom Policymakers: The Case of the Kindergarten
Watching a policy travel from the White House, a state capitol, or a big city school board to a kindergarten teacher in her classroom has been compared (see my post September 9, 2009) to metal links in a chain, the children’s game of Telephone, and pushing spaghetti. Classroom teachers at the end of the iron-forged links in a chain convey military images of privates saluting captains and duties getting snappily discharged. The telephone game suggests miscommunications that ends up in hilarious misinterpretations of what was intended by the original policy. Pushing strands of wet spaghetti suggests futility in getting a policy ever to be put into practice in classrooms. Which metaphor, then, best describes going from adopting a policy to putting it into practice?
The truth is that for each metaphor actual examples of policies do fit the image. Yet other instances of teachers implementing policies fail to fit. There are other metaphors that better match the wide variation among teachers