As a classroom teacher, I feel that my current role in my school involves elements from all of the mental models that Schlechty  describes in Leading for Learning.  As I think of my school as a learning organization,  I deeply appreciate my idealized role in the classroom as a guide and leader.  Philosophically, I have always worked towards creating a classroom environment in which I take a secondary role to the students and “direct the attention of the students to other sources of instruction” (Schlechty, 2009, pg. 126).  This is not to say that I embody the idea of the lazy tenured public school teacher depicted in “Waiting for ‘Superman'”, but rather I see the value of having students learn for themselves and from sources “more powerful than the teacher” (pg. 126).  In an effort to guide students to authentic, individualized, applicable knowledge, I try to set my classroom up for students to take a more active role in their own learning.

This mental model, however, is not always the reality in my classroom.  Due to the test and results-driven nature of public education, I often find myself embodying the view of the teacher described in the factory and professional service delivery organization models, as well as that of “Waiting for ‘Superman'”.  This film made several references to teachers’ responsibilities as assembling or dumping knowledge into their students “like workers on an assembly line”.  (pg. 80)  These images of students on a conveyor belt, though deplored by teachers like myself, have become the norm because of policymakers’ needs to quantify student growth in the form of test data.  I feel pressured to process and push my students through a set of standards and basic goals them must meet by years’ end.  I also often feel that my duties include the service delivery organization’s view of my role as a diagnostician.  When I find, based on test-driven data, that a student is in danger of not meeting this factory-like standards, I must “diagnose and prescribe” (pg. 92) remedial measures so that my students can continue along the school’s assembly line.

Despite these sometimes gloomy realties of schooling, I believe that I can affect more change in the public school system than “Waiting for ‘Superman'” and these mental models lead many to believe is possible.  In fact, I feel that some of the positive changes that are making my role closer to that of a guide (as seen in the learning organization model) are because of public school’s involvement in my charter school.  As part of a public district whose newly-adopted model is “Great by Choice”, I am afforded many opportunities to implement instruction in which students “work on and with knowledge and knowledge-based products” (pg. 125).  By working with the student-centered approaches advocated by the district’s Social Studies curriculum, my students are learning to investigate, research, and question the problems of history as they encounter them.  Unlike the documentary’s view of public schools as unable to be fixed, my charter school (and my role in it) are improving and functioning better because of our involvement in some of these public policies.  I wish that the director of this film could have shown the aspects of public schools that do put the interests and focus on the students first, rather than the failing schools that do not.

References

Schlechty, P. (2009) Leading for learning: How to transform schools into learning organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.