My fourth year teaching, I moved from a really small school to a district with 30,000 kids.
It was a great district, very open to new ideas and growing like crazy.
That year they implemented a new “Continuous Improvement” program. At it’s core, it was a good thing. Basically, it was a process of trying something new, seeing how it went, adjusting accordingly and trying again.
A good thing.
But the program itself felt a little heavy-handed. We were required to take a class, required to use the process, and required to post a symbol representing the steps in our buildings.
“Continuous Improvement.” Every staff meeting, every team meeting, every district newsletter. Over and over and over and over.
Eventually it became really hard for many of us not to roll our eyes or shake our heads whenever the phrase “continuous improvement” was mentioned.
So tonight, as I was attempting to title a blog post about changes made to the website today, the phrase “continuous improvement” popped into my head.
And I cringed.
More than a decade later, and I still cringed.
So I’ll just say this: Today I started the process that will result – a couple days from now – in this blog moving to a new home. It will be more closely connected to the actual fortheteachers.org website – making it possible for visitors to register for email or RSS feed if they want to be notified when new materials are posted, to all0w files to be uploaded so that we can better take advantage of ideas teachers are willing to share, and other potentionally fun and nifty things.
Continuous improvement? Pretty much, but let’s just keep that to ourselves.
