One Size Fits All

Yeah right! I was 6' 2" in the fifth grade and have had a few embarrassing encounters with the whole one size fits all craze. I have to say, for the typical kid growing up the one size fits all approach is a great way to buy clothes, you typically can't go wrong. But does the same hold true in other arenas as well? No!

Most parents will tell you that what worked to get one of your children to sleep at 2:00 in the morning did not work for the second. Or that because your son ate the whipped up sweet potatoes, doesn't necessarily mean that your daughter will eat them.

I'm learning this all too quickly. For Nick, school comes easily, he doesn't really have to work at it. He became a reader naturally, it seemed that one day he came home and could read. For Lily it's different. We are working with her to identify letter sounds and to use that strategy to decode unfamiliar words. She has a great site word vocabulary, but struggles with unfamiliar words because of some phoneme challenges.

I have continually been asked, or should I say told, by some people who are very close to me in our building that there is a fear of what exactly consistency and structure translates to. Do all the Who's in Whoville need to be whoing the same way? No! That is not how consistency and structure is applied in this situation. There is no one size fits all.

I do not expect to see the same lesson going on in all six classrooms with the same vocabulary. I do expect everyone to be teaching similar standards, from the same adoption (Investigations), with similar strategies. However, it very rarely looks the same, and that's a good thing, because all of our students are different. They all have different needs. Even in your own classroom what you do for one child should be much different than what you do for others. Think of Bill Murray in Ground Hog's Day or Jim Carey in "The Truman Show". These scenarios although very dramatized are not what help us become better educational leaders.

Please don't take this message to mean that we can now be wild and free. My stance is still the same and we are making some great strides to make our instructional day more meaningful for all our students. With Structure, we need to be providing the framework for our students to be successful each and every day. With Consistency - there should be no surprises for our students when they walk into our classrooms. Should my classroom, mirror that of my grade level colleagues? Yes, but it's a carnival mirror. You may be stretching in one direction that is different than your neighbor.

In all my four years as Principal at BH I have not seen as much teacher growth than I have seen in these first 12 weeks of school. I thank you for that and encourage you to continue to seek ways to improve and try on some new things, no matter what the size.