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Decision Making Procedures at a Teacher-Powered School
At teacher-powered schools, teachers share responsibility for making and implementing decisions about programs, practices, and policies. But how does this work in practice? The answer varies by school, but these examples from San Francisco Community School (a teacher-powered school since 1972) helps explain how, typically, whole teams make some decisions by consensus and delegate other decisions to committees or individual leaders. Two charts are attached. One existed prior to the local administrative union taking issue with teachers conducting evaluations, which led to a requirement that the school have a principal to handle evaluation and some other administrator duties. The other exists today, and reflects how the team has adapted to this change. Both are useful for teams designing and running teacher-powered schools to consider as potential models.
What do the acronyms in the document stand for?
ASP = After School Program
DLT = Developmental Leadership Teams (organized by grade level)
HT = Head Teacher
MS = Middle School
PD = Professional Development
UBC = Union Building Committee (present in all schools in the San Francisco Unified School District)