All Roles and Roads Lead Back To The Classroom Series - Part 1

A couple of weeks ago, this idea hit me so I decided to tweet it out.

My two years as a Dean of Students, in addition to my first two years in admin as an AP at the middle school level, taught me that my Principal should not be bogged down with the discipline issues and decisions to the point where they are constantly away from instructional matters. This concept has been tugging at my core lately. As I interact with teachers and administrators on Twitter and my Voxer groups, it is evident that this is an area of concern or struggle in many schools across America. 

Now I have a renewed focus for my blog posts and writing as I unpack this area in 2020 through reading, research, and what I consider most important, organic conversations with teachers and administrators from everywhere. 

My focus with this post is on the nature of the role of Dean of Students and Behavior Interventionist (BI). If you were to look at the job descriptions for job openings for Dean of Students and/or BI's, you will almost likely find one glaring statement of similar wording to the one below:

• this person will collaborate with administration, teachers, counselors, social workers, and other pertinent personnel to develop appropriate and positive behavior modifications or supports to assist students in being successful across a variety of settings

When looking at this one sample component of Dean's or BI's role, this component can and will help schools to meet the needs of students that need the extra support and Principals to spend time in classrooms instead of disciplining students. However, we must provide the job-embedded modeling, professional development (PD), and training for Deans and BI's in order to make this a reality. Many times in schools across the globe, the process of dealing with behavior or discipline issues entails:

1. The teacher informs the Dean, BI, or admin
2. The Dean, BI, or admin are first to pull the student from class to have a talk with him or her about the behavior 
3. The student returns to the classroom with our without a consequence (this depends on the school and/or district's code of conduct, policies, procedures, or protocols, but consequences is not a part of this discussion or the intent of my journey)
4. The cycle continues with multiple students throughout the school that are experiencing behavior or socioemotional concerns

I must admit, I have been guilty of this process on many occasions as a Dean and AP until peer accountability from my PLN and other mentors convicted me to grow in this area. School leaders, myself included, must shift our time away from "jumping in to discipline" issues with our Deans and BI's. The new focus of our time needs to be on developing and modeling for our Deans and BI's on how to go in the classrooms to "collect evidence" in the same way that as evaluators we "collect evidence" during our teacher observations. 

These roles may not be classroom based roles, but we need to create the culture around these roles that supports them being in the classrooms. I will be the first to sing the praises of educators that serve in these roles because many times, their days consist of tending to difficult situations, minimized or missed personal lunch times to deal with issues, working with bus drivers, meeting with parents, and the list goes on and on. Having served in one of these roles, I'd never minimize their worth. I am on a mission to celebrate these educators and ensure they are supported in ways that help them have the latest evidence-based practices at their disposal to help them help the students they serve. The same way that we throw a lot of money at PD for our teachers, we need to look at ways to provide PD for our Deans and BI's.This ultimately leads back to the classroom in the sense that Principals can be in classrooms for most of their days. This starts with the mindset towards how we improve the culture and climate of our schools.

I will extend on these ideas and thoughts in later posts, which will add other school based, or specialist roles outside of the classroom. This is just the tip of the iceberg of my journey towards unlocking the keys to supporting these roles while increasing instructional.