On Trust | Connected Principals

On Trust | Connected Principals:

On Trust

May 20, 2012

By Brian Harrison

Photo credit: mayte_pons http://bit.ly/L9lCj4

“I discovered, to my surprise, that the adults in school~even colleagues who had more or less equal power~found it hard to trust each other. Something about teaching is so personal and raw that teachers spend a lot of energy avoiding serious help from those who could best give  it.”           ~Deborah Meier~

Our district has embarked upon an ambitious project; the adoption of the Instructional Rounds protocol as a process to support networked professional learning across the district. Instructional Rounds is a model of collaborative professional inquiry that has been developed under the leadership of Richard Elmore and a team of educators at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Based upon 7 guiding principles, the essential premise of Rounds is that improvements in student learning can only occur through the careful observation, description and analysis of classroom practice with subsequent predictions and suggestions on what may need to done to