Ghost Busting

While schools seem like historical institutions that anchor a community with continuity, they are always changing. While one school can provide a connection through generations in a neighborhood, the school that existed for the baby boomers is not what exists for the millennials. I went to a high school that just celebrated its centennial and while the name over the door remained the same, almost everything else has changed.

Every year the students, staff, and community change. New educational policies and reforms are instituted and old ones are forgotten. New events become traditions and new initiatives become protocols. One of the reasons that schools are so hard to change is that they come with history that was created through the efforts of the many people that were part of moving a school from a building to a monument to community accomplishment. While some traditions provide connections within a neighborhood, others hang on long
past their usefulness.

As we have moved forward to change things in my school, there has been continuous discussion around how we got to where we are today. My school is less than fifteen years old, but there have been many changes since its inception. Many of the policies where put in place in order to solve problems that we are still facing, but others have lost their relevance. As we push forward to make the necessary changes to address our current student, staff and community needs, we are often stopped by these irrelevant policies, procedures and traditions. Last year, I began to call these policies ghosts because they continue to haunt us long after they are no longer relevant.

These ghosts haunt us for many reasons: we have failed to reassess their ability to meet the needs that we currently have, we lack an understanding of why they were put in place, and or we simply are still doing them because we have always done it that way. Most of the time, they do not cause problems. We have adjusted them to meet our needs each year, but in adjusting past practice, we find it difficult to develop new practices that better meet our needs. They continue to hang around and distract us from the work ahead, clouding the next steps in the process, and make us a less flexible school. Instead of developing something new, we are consumed with making something we have always done survive for another year.

Over the past year, a few teachers have engaged in a ghost busting process. We started getting together to discuss where we want the school to go and what ghosts haunt us from getting there. Throughout these meetings, I have seen that three steps are needed to bust ghosts.

• Figure Out the Ghost Story - Do Research - Find someone that was there when it was created. As the years go by, schools change. People responsible for policies are no longer with us and we are left with an incomplete understanding of why we do things the way that we do. Ideas that were created for one set of circumstances, may no longer exist. The policies then still hang around, bent for a new purpose, when a brand new policy is needed. By finding someone who was there when it was created, we can better understand the development of the policy, procedure or tradition, why it was created, and why it was changed or maintained throughout the years.

• Determine if it is Ghost - Re-examine the Circumstances - once we know where the ghost came from, we have to decide if it is a friendly ghost, or one that we need to bust. We need to see if the original circumstances still exist and if the policy, procedure or tradition is still relevant or valuable. If it is still valuable, it is not a ghost. Many great ideas are lost through the years and would be great to bring back. They are ghosts due to neglect and not due to their irrelevance. These policies should not haunt us but rather guide us forward. In conversations with colleagues, we came up with many of these that we felt should be brought back to life. The critical step is then the reflection on the relevance. If it is no longer relevant, then it is a ghost and we must bust it.

• Ghost Busting - Eliminating the Irrelevant - Busting ghosts all comes back to open dialogue and honest discussion. We need to discuss the old policy, why it was there, and why it needs to be brought back or eliminated. This has to be done out in the open, with all parties involved. Staff, students and families need to be part of the discussion. As with any policy, procedure or tradition, there will be detractors and defenders. By allowing all parties to come in and advocate for their position, a ghost can be busted and a new, more relevant policy can be put in place. If people are not privy to the discussion, they will continue to be haunted by the ghost. Only by bringing the ghost to light through discussion will they be changed and stay busted.

This process is long and we have had real challenges at my school with making it happen. One person’s ghost is another person’s sacred cow and worth defending. We have taken steps forward and steps backwards, but we are working together. Schools are buildings with long institutional memory full of ghosts, but also the great work of generations committed to making it a great place. By ghost busting we hope to only to continue building that monument to community accomplishment.

Cross-posted at http://edge.ascd.org/_Ghost-Busting/blog/6564149/127586.html