Teacher Development and Educational Change by Hargreaves Andy. Fullan Michael

Author:Hargreaves, Andy.,Fullan, Michael.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317973485
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Two main changes occurred in the school that year. These changes are shown in ovals in Figure 7.1. One change was the continued experimentation with alternatives to the basal readers. This change was influenced by a series of workshops that occurred— starting with Wassermann in the early Spring of 1986, followed by McCracken, Johnson, and the reading conference attended by several members of the staff. 1 The workshops encouraged teachers to continue experimenting with alternatives to the basal reading programme. They also served to legitimize such experimentation.

The second change that occurred in the first year involved an activity called theme days. This began in the early Fall when several primary teachers planned the use of small and large group activity to combine Music, Drama and Art. Later in the Spring the intermediate teachers, seeing the success of the programme, suggested that the whole school might well get involved. Two groupings of children were organized—K-3 and 4–7—around the Fine Arts, much as before. And, as before, children broke down into small groups with different individuals providing various experiences for them. This time, however, school board members, parents, and district helping teachers took a part. Soon the whole school became involved and for five weeks the theme of multicultural education became part of the students' lives every Friday.

The concept of theme days caught the imagination of several teachers in the school, and numerous staff meetings were held to work out the details of teacher cooperation across the grades to implement this concept. One of the teachers who was instrumental in starting the project described its influence this way:

One of the things that made a big change in our staff was theme day. It gave teachers a chance to do whole language for half a day. It was a time to sort of feel your way through, and no one told you what you had to do for that half a day, or full day of theme. It wasn't based on a reading series or on a reading level; there were kids of all grade levels. So you had to come up with something interesting that kids could do at their own rate, and the product wasn't the most important thing, it was the process. It led to the integrated. So I think that theme day was a really good way to get staff started on many things.

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