Love this idea.
Administrators in Florida’s Broward school district will be required to work as substitute teachers this year. “A similar project is in the works in Miami-Dade, where Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has proposed creating an “Everybody Teaches” Academy to bring district administrators into classrooms of struggling schools at least six times a year,” the Miami Herald reports.
The Broward plan was the brainchild of Kathie Herrera, a 2nd grade teacher. “It’s very good for the teachers,” she said. “It does make them feel like the higher-ups — the ones promoting the curriculum, deciding on the standards that we should be teaching — actually get a feel for what goes on in the classroom.”
Any chance of launching a similar initiative for ed policy folks?
(H/T: Gotham Schools)
I also love it Robert, first-hand experience to whether the policies and practices trickling down from administration are working. Added benefit is that if they’re not doing a great job for the kids in the schools, they get to spend terrible substitute day with their glaring mistakes staring right at them. Just punishment, and an even more important wake-up call.
The risk is that they’ll enjoy a little honeymoon with the kids –they’re fresh; they didn’t have to create the lesson plans; they won’t have to grade the papers afterwards; and the kids may be charmed by the novelty. I used to experience this when I subbed; kids would say, “You teach us more than our teacher” or “You’re nicer than our teacher.” Now I’m the regular teacher and, sad to say, I know some of my kids say the same things to my subs. It’s one thing to breeze into a classroom for a day; it’s a far bigger challenge to construct a curriculum from scratch (which most of us have to do), iron out lessons, make copies, hook up technology, field tons of emails, administer district-mandated reading tests, enter reams of data, grade reams of papers, maintain discipline over the long haul, ad infinitum. Subs have it easy. Administrators may walk away with the false impression that teaching is not so hard.
Kids in your school are clearly much nicer to subs than we were to ours growing up!
I’ve never subbed, so I can’t speak from experience, but my intuition tells me Ben F has it right. I think one would have to teach a class everyday for at least a month, maybe several months, to really get an idea of what it’s like in the real world.