RR5: Reinventing Schools that Keep Teachers Teaching

This article revolves around the idea that if we want teachers who are smart, caring, alive to students' needs, and are in it for the long haul, we need to consider how to create schools that are themselves centers for the continual learning of everyone connected to them. Thus, it is important for schools to create a positive community among the staff and teachers where there exist good communication and support. The article tells the story about a woman working in an inner cirty school of Chicago, where her an her fellow teachers created a school where students, teachers, and the community grew together. The school focues on lots of netwroking, community involvemnt, connections across the curriculums, professional development, and created a school culture that bounded the students and teacher together. The underlying idea froom this article is that we cannot dare continue to keep kids in schools for so many years, incarcerated if you will, without doing a better job of making our schools places we all love. Places that we can't wait to come to every morning and that we leave, exhausted and pleased with ourselves, every afternoon. Places where long-term experience and wisdom are not dismissed as the bad products of "seniority" rules, but what good societies take seriously. Schools are for the children, but they are also where the young build their images of adulthood. Our schools need to serve the students and the teachers.


During my future teaching years, I believe it is so important to "know the culture and be the culture" of your school. The most effective teaching steems from creating positive communities within a school and the individual classrooms, where students feel that their teachers care about them and their learning. I want to create a mutual respect between my students and myself. To do this, I will have to get to know and understand my students, so that I can best serve their needs. I want my students to know that I have a open door policy where they should feel welcome to come talk to me and ask me questions. I want to be involved in the school community by participating in after-school activities and professional development. I want to become a cooperative team player with my fellow teachers, in which I can learn from and gather new ideas from my collegues. If I can make connections from my content to my students' lives and/or community, then I will be reaching for more long term learning out of my students. The article talked about changing of an entire school, which I know I am not capable of doing. However, I can be actively engaged, have a positive attitude, and  be open to try new things in order to maintain that sense of continious learning and progression.