Empowering the school!

I have to say that this book was just what I needed to support some of my ideas. One year ago my school with through an evaluation process from the state of Georgia. As one of our campus leaders I was one of the people that had to meet with state personal in a collaborative setting with personal from the state. One of the comments that I made was that a school should be set up in such manner that any school should be able to call upon staff from within the school to teach best practices. I was asked to elaborate on my comment and as Pernille Ripp referred to as “Cultivating the Expert Within” is the very idea that I expressed. One of the instructional strategies that is written in our school improvement plan is small groups. During one staff meeting our principal gave a shot out to one of our teachers for the way the used small groups in the classroom. Well the very next week we had a district coach come in and teach us about small group. I felt as though it was perfect time for the teacher to share with us exactly what she was doing in her classroom to be successful using small groups. With all that being said the two common themes that helps summarize Pernille Ripp’s book is trusting you co-works, and overcoming your professional fears. Trust and fear were the two common reasons that the author mentioned about the school leaders empowering teachers, and teachers empower students. The author writes that to implement the change leaders have to assume that each staff member will share the common believe that students come first. I am a firm believer in shared power. I believe this is important because I think that “one monkey should not stop the show.” Ripp mentioned empowering students by giving the students a voice. I feel this is equally as important as teachers having a voice. I remember just a few months back I was in a committee meeting about positive behavior. We were trying to figure out how to celebrate the students who had demonstrated good behavior. My recommendation was that lets allow the students to tell us what they would like especially sense all of the committee members seemed to be bored and not wanting to be there.