I have been at my placement site for almost 2 months now and while I wasn’t planning on a whirlwind plan of change I was at least hoping for a little more action. I have a great long list of things I am supposed to accomplish but little can actually get done because teachers are impossible to find, my supervisor always in meetings or at conferences, and our principle is currently interviewing for a position in Bozeman. I work well with little supervision but when all the questions I have can only be answered by the above mentioned people, sometimes getting an answer takes 5 days.
I got tired of waiting around so I started creating work for myself. I am working on developing student-led conferences which will not actually be taking place until October. In the mean time, I have developed research packets, created brochures, informational postcards, and watched videos of student-led conferences taking place. Teachers are fussy about participating in student-led conferences mainly because they don’t have much information or a venue to address questions and concerns. My hope is to use all these resources to hold a forum to discuss conferences so that teachers may have questions answered and understand how conferences work. When it comes time to implement these conferences in October, teachers will already have an idea of what takes place and conferences can begin with few complications.
That is what I did last week.
Throughout the month, I have been working on the job shadowing program. I feel so much concern for this program because it is so important and few people want to deal with it. I have mentioned before that the job shadowing program will not exist without a VISTA in place and addressing capacity building is difficult because teachers and staff are already extremely busy.
Last month, I spent the majority of time brainstorming and researching effective job shadow programs. I met with other high school teachers who use our job shadow database and ultimately, our frustrating conclusion, is that the database and job shadow program needs to be completely renovated.
The database is 10 years old, extremely out of date, and hard to use. Students have to sign a million forms before participating and these forms were created in 1988. Most of the businesses that are listed in the database are out of business or retired. Teachers don’t want to make 10 calls to find only 1 still exists. However, the database is an excellent resource and could be effective if redesigned but it would cost thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of time. After assessing the needs of teachers, staff, and students and understanding the complications we have decided to start from scratch. Working with other high schools will minimize the workload and using mailings to assess the entire community interests will be a better way of targeting community members rather than calling the already existing 3245 members in the old database.
I love movement and change but I am impatient like so many other visionaries. I know what I am supposed to do but the steps seem so far away. I get frustrated when at the end of the day all I have done is called 10 community members and sent a few emails. I have to stop and remember that it cant all be done in one day, one week, or one month. My site has three years left on their grant so any work I complete is useful and one step closer to our goal.
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