Then there's the matter of who teaches what. Most Louisville middle school teachers are not certified to teach in a particular subject area, but can teach any subject in the elementary and middle grades. Hard-pressed principals often shuffle teachers from one subject to another as they juggle schedules and try to manage frequent staff turnover. Many people think so. Many believe the real energy for change must originate in the schools themselves.
Schools have to have the conversations around standards.
Rather than rely on the traditional outside experts to tell them how to change, many teachers say what they need is more study and sharing of best practices among themselves. What we need is time to do it and discuss it and keep working on it. We don't know what it looks like in the classroom. We've been given something to do, we've been given documents and books, but when it comes to actually doing it, we haven't had the examples out there that show us how to do it. We've talked about it, but most teachers haven't yet internalized standards in their daily teaching.