Should our leaders spend there time thinking about how to get students to obey policies or should we be thinking about what students need to be successful ? It seems to me based on which question you answer you have two different schools. I think that most of us are worried about the first question which leads to working on compliance instead of wondering what students need to be successful.
Thoughts?
I think administrators should be thinking about what students need to be successful. If they focus too much on compliance it turns into a power struggle that will probably not end well for anyone involved. I'm not saying that all rules should be abolished, but there comes a point where it just doesn't even make sense anymore. For example, filtering what kinds of websites can be accessed during school hours is not inherently a bad idea, but making it so that we can't do effective research is. Or my second personal favorite, edline is sometimes blocked if you try to use firefox. What is blocking edline on firefox accomplishing? The sole purpose of that can only be to force you into IE and what is that accomplishing? IE takes forever on a good day, mix that with the notoriously slow school computers and that might be half a class period wasted.
ReplyDeleteI think this principle also applies nicely to schedule requirements, most poignantly the gym requirement. Requiring a gym credit isn't a bad idea, forcing students to take an in-school gym class is downright insensitive. As someone who is pursuing dance as a career, a gym class is frankly counterproductive because the jock mentality enforced by the class breeds injuries that will ruin a dance career. Additionally, to any student who is gender fluid or openly gay, the locker room becomes a scary place, even at Dulaney. The gym requirements opens up an entirely different discussion to me, so back to the topic at hand, administrators should not enforce policies to the point of counter-productivity.