Sticky Issues
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Sticky Issues Archive >
In this section, principals tell how they handled a challenging situation, how some policy that was in place actually worked, and the lessons learned from dealing with these Sticky Issues. Send your stories to principal@osu.edu. Please indicate if we may use your name in the “contributor” credits.
Learning Something from the NFL
The NFL draft has proven to be a model of building fairness into the building of football teams. The less successful teams get to choose players first. Over time, this ensures that no team is unfairly stacked with all of the best players, but each lower-performing team has a chance to build a stronger team. This is the time of the year when student placements are considered for next year. Teachers can be very vocal and demanding about their preferences for which students/ assignments they get. Often, principals will shift the more troublesome students or the more difficult assignments off on a new or inexperienced faculty member rather than suffer the wrath of a tenured or established popular teacher. Doesn’t it make sense in building integrity and fairness into the system to give the more troublesome students or difficult assignments to the more experienced tenured teachers and giving better students to less experienced or weaker teachers? This allows the new or inexperienced teacher time to build up his/her confidence and repertoire of skills, get acclimated to the school, and get on solid footing before taking on greater challenges.
In one situation where there was a discipline transfer, I called in the second-grade team and explained the circumstances of the incoming student. I appealed to their sense of professionalism and caring for students to ask them to help in making the decision about which teacher would be best to work with this incoming discipline transfer. After a very honest conversation, the team came to consensus that one particular teacher would be best to take on the student. The others pledged to help and to be available to lighten her load if the student proved to be too much. The team set about to prepare for the new student’s arrival. By the time he arrived, they were determined that this setting was going to work for him. A well-prepared teacher greeted him with a genuine smile. This student did very well and eventually made “good citizen”! I feel I acted with integrity and fairness in solving this dilemma. I could have arbitrarily assigned the student with no prior dialogue. I could have disguised the discipline transfer aspect of the case, but I chose to have open and honest collaboration. This ethical decision bore good results.
