It was the faculty meeting. Summer relaxation was just a few short weeks past, though at the moment it seemed like light years. The principal stood at the front of the auditorium, the teachers dispersed around the back half, silent, waiting. She waved a crisp envelope at the wide-eyed group and shook her head. "I know you have all been waiting for these. This is mine." She turned and walked to a large garbage pail that none of us had noticed was there until then and ripped her unopened envelope in half once, and then again, and tossed it into the pail.
Teachers sitting near the front of the auditorium started clapping. As everyone else slowly realized the audacity of what our principal had just done, the applause spread.
When we quieted down again, she said, "I know each and every one of you is a good teacher, you care about your students, you care about each other, and you care about our school. I don't need a letter with an arbitrary score to tell me that." By the thunderous applause and laughter, one would have thought that the staff was much more than sixty people thick.
The letters were of course, our state evaluations, a number based on a test score, either in your content area or not, that determined how effective you are as a teacher. The principal told us that our letters would be in our mailboxes and it was up to us to decide if we wanted to toss them in the large garbage pail next to our mailboxes, opened or not.
Teachers left that faculty meeting saying things like, "This is gonna be a great year," and "Finally, we can focus on teaching and not worry about a stupid number." I felt the confidence in the room swell like a balloon being filled.
With one swift action, our principal made us feel like gods—or at least, like trusted confidants in a community of professionals. We felt worthy to do our very best and now had the motivation to do it. After several years of feeling quite the opposite, the climate in our 760-student, 65-teacher, 3-administrator middle school in the suburbs of Orange County, New York, began to recharge with optimism and eager intent. The change was palpable. Teacher absences were much fewer than in the previous three years, and talk in the faculty room centered on lesson improvements and student achievement, rather than complaints over the Danielson Framework and unfair mandates.
Looking back on our former, demoralized school culture, it's clear that administrators and teachers shared a common barrier: loss of focus. In all the rush to do what was "right," what got lost was what was truly important: the students. Politics had fired up the kiln, and districts were scurrying to stay out of the fire. As a result, principals were handed curricula by superintendents at the behest of their money-worried boards of education. New evaluation systems were being mandated; whether they were good or bad, the real problem was the lack of time to implement them at all. Teachers' feet were held to the fire to execute new modules without any training, often without materials, and to do it perfectly. We lost sight of our center. Students are the reason we are educators; they are our motivation. Once the principal removed barriers to that focus, teachers were free to do what they do best. By giving the teachers back their motivation, the principal changed the climate of the entire school.
All it took was for our leader to take a stand, to show that she was with us and ready to focus on moving forward, not stagnating over directives we couldn't possibly execute immediately. And when she began to talk about changing classroom methodologies, we didn't roll our eyes and grumble. We listened. We dreamed. We began.