Brandon Adame

Brandon Adame is a third grade teacher at Blandford Elementary School. When this story was told, he was a second grade teacher at Blandford.

My first encounter with Ball was when I worked on one of the strategic planning teams for the district. My principal proposed that I be a part of the process, so I said, “Okay. I’ll see what this is all about.” Quite honestly, I didn’t know anything about Ball and I had no idea what I was getting into. Basically, what we did was meet and talk about where the district is currently, and where we want it to be based on our vision.

At first I was really skeptical and felt intimidated. Our strategic planning group was made up of teachers, principals, and parents from throughout the entire district, and I was a first-year teacher – straight from college. But in the end, I think it was good that I had just come out of college. During the process, I remember thinking, “Okay, what do I want?” So I read my old essays that I wrote in college about what I was going to do as a teacher and how the kids were going to do this and be so great. When I read that, I thought, “Wow, that’s so not what it is.” But I knew we could get there – and that’s what I think I brought to the process.

Ball gave us the opportunity to have an open forum to talk as if there were no limits on what we could do. They said to us, “Forget about the limits. We’ll worry about that later. Let’s talk about what you want.” So every day we started by saying, “Don’t have limits. Don’t say we can’t do this.” Instead, we talked about where we wanted our students to be, and about what we could do if there were no testing or monetary limitations. For me, it was really refreshing to sit down and get back to basics, and to see what everyone wanted for the students. We all wanted the same thing, but we all felt that testing prohibited that. The process also changed my thinking to, “Let’s think beyond testing, and maybe eventually we’ll get rid of the things that are holding us back.”

One thing we started talking about was technology. A lot of students have access to computer labs, but not their own computers. So we said, “Imagine a day where kids have their own laptops and can access the internet at any time.”

I think the greatest thing that we talked about was changing the whole report card system. Instead of having letter grades, have an individualized action plan for each student based on their strengths and needs, and actually have students demonstrate their knowledge through different means – not just test taking. For example, if students like to work with their hands, say to them, “Build this for me.”

Talking about the whole structure of education, and especially the report cards really made me think, “Wow, I’ve been stuck with the same model and haven’t thought of other ones. But thinking about these new models – wouldn’t that be a great thing to see happen with the kids?”

The hardest part of the process was the word-smithing that we did. We would develop a couple of objectives for our action plan, and then someone would say, “I don’t feel comfortable with that word, let’s change it.” Or we’d say, “We agree that we all believe this should happen for kids,” and then someone would say, “You know what? I don’t quite believe that.” So, we’d go back to the drawing board day after day, and we’d e-mail each other, “Is this okay? Do you think this would work?” We’d think we were done with our action plan, and then the next day someone would say, “Well, I don’t quite feel comfortable.”

So that was the hard part. We kept going back and changing it. Every single time we did that, my ideas changed. In fact, everyone’s ideas changed and we’d be back at square one. At first, it was pretty annoying. I was like, “Come on, guys, just settle for it.” But I think that was the best part because people had so much buy-in – they didn’t want to just settle for it. They wanted something that everyone was proud of, and that everyone felt comfortable with. I think that’s what we ended up with, too. So that was a very good thing.

I’ve been able to implement some of the things that came out of the strategic planning process, like the APA principles that we talked about. Honestly, I may have heard about the principles in college, but here we actually looked at them and dissected each one. I have them on the wall in my classroom now, and I look at them when I do my lesson plans, trying to accommodate the students’ needs. I also have little notebooks in which I make notes about the kids and what their strengths are. For example, in a science lesson I’ll let the students use different ways to show me what they learned. That’s really helped me out a lot.

I’ve noticed that the enthusiasm of my students is changing because now I’m targeting their strengths and letting them show me that they know something. A lot of my kids can’t pass a paper and pencil reading comprehension test, so instead I’ll ask them verbally to explain what’s going on in what they read – which is something they can do.

My relationship with other teachers has changed as well. During meetings, I now express different points of view, and I open my mind to new things. I also participate more, and I think I add a little more to conversations because of what I’ve learned and what I’ve learned from others.

Being part of this process was a great experience for me. I’ll be honest with you, it wasn’t the easiest thing. It was a lot of work, but at the end, I think we all looked at each other like, “Wow, we all gained a lot from this.” So, it was definitely worth it.

Word cloud created at wordle.net.