Student Learning example essay topic

We had sensed for some time that something was wrong - site-based management had not been delivering the goods. We formed leadership teams; they met; we shared decision making - but teaching and learning didn't change. "Perhaps too much had been expected from simply the transfer of power", suggest Priscilla Wohlstetter and Susan Albers Mohr man, who have written an extensive study looking at the outcomes of sharing decision making in schools. The idea always was to improve education for kids; but instead what seemed to have happened in many places was that there was another meeting to attend and nothing much else was new. "Is the theory flawed? Is the current wave of decentralization just another swing of the pendulum?" ask these authors, whose study of practice looked at thirty schools in nine school districts, each of which had at least four years' experience with school-based management.

We were asking ourselves the same questions. As principals of alternative high schools in New York City, we each had been deeply involved in school reform for over fifteen years. Each of our schools struggled incessantly with "group management" at Satellite Academy High School and consensus-based decision making at University Heights High School. During this time, our own experiences and observations, combined with those shared in professional development opportunities with colleagues in other New York schools and around the country, helped us learn a number of valuable lessons. AUDIO CLIP Nancy Mohr on "Why we wrote this article" Listen to the audio clip and read a transcript. We saw for ourselves the tremendous power that can be generated within a school when the professional staff genuinely experiences a sense of ownership.

But we learned that adult empowerment, for its own sake, is too limited a goal. We found that adult ownership, while necessary, does not in and of itself make learning more powerful for students. We learned how to get beyond ownership as a goal and how to develop professional communities of learners, focused on teaching and learning, that are able to take advantage of the multiple perspectives a community can offer. Our conclusions, based on hands-on experience, are supported and illuminated by research findings in recent literature.

Michael Fullan (1993) cites several studies of site-based-management projects, none of which found evidence of a strong connection between shared decision making per se and student learning. "The point is not that participation in decision making is a bad thing", Fullan cautions, but "that it is not focusing on the right things - the cultural core of curriculum and instruction". Participation may be necessary in order to build the habits of collaboration, which are essential, but it is not sufficient for improving student outcomes. Robert Evans (1996) explores the kinds of shared decision making that do create a link between adult empowerment, student learning, and leader behavior. 'O Teachers who are empowered to make decisions about their school will structure their classrooms to empower students in the learning process, encouraging students to take greater responsibility for their own education", he asserts.

"A key point... is that empowerment's true target is not teachers or any other constituency, but the school... To achieve it requires an authentic leader to take the primary role in both shaping the framework and nurturing the capacity of others to help shape it". Fred Newmann and Gary Wehlage (1995) show that higher student achievement has been directly linked to the building of professional communities - groups of educators who regularly meet to discuss each other's work and to learn from each other about ways to improve teaching and learning. Newmann's work on authentic learning (1996) points out why some schools in his study had higher student achievement than others. In addition to focusing on student learning, the achieving schools nurtured professional community inside the school and understood that "the promotion of intellectual quality and professional community depended on a complex interaction of cultural and structural conditions.".