The Ship is Sinking

The Assistant Principal Podcast

Show Notes, Episode 28: The Ship is Sinking

About this show:

Imagine you’re on a nice little boat, floating along a gentle river or out on a calm lake. Everything is fine until you hear a gurgling sound. You look down and are astounded to see water pouring in from a how in the bottom of the boat. You grab your red Solo cup and begin scooping out water, but it isn’t enough. You look around for something to patch the hole with – nothing. As you look around despondently, you notice a faded plastic bucket floating your way. You manage to get ahold of it and redouble your efforts. Aided by the size of the bucket you begin to get the boat emptied and over the next few hours you alternate between bailing and rowing. The shore is getting closer. You may make it.

Notable Quotes

Frederick:

“The way a lot of states are responding to the teacher shortage is to lower the requirements for being a teacher. That is going to open it up to more people, but those people are going to come in facing increased challenges with even less preparation. So, we have to assume at this point that teachers coming to us are underprepared.”

“We have three holes: we’re losing teachers, kids are coming to us with incredible challenges, and the teachers we do have coming into the profession are underprepared.”

“Right now, we don’t do anything differently for early career teachers as we do for all of our other teachers. We don’t have anything set as a system that lets us really focus in and tactically and strategically work with those folks, and we can’t do that anymore. We need to structure things in our building to allow us as instructional leaders to really focus and lift up our early career teachers”

“I think it is time for us to think about [classroom] procedures as being something that is school-wide”

“Five aspects to this ‘plastic bucket’ that we need to pull out of the water:

1. Stop doing what we’ve always been doing

2. Change the structures in our building to help our instructional leadership team focus specifically on supporting early career teachers

3. Streamline procedures so that everyone is using the same ones

4. Be more directive in our coaching with early career teachers

5. Move from the idea of just supporting first to third year teachers to supporting them in their whole early career, 3-5 years out”

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