As I mentioned in the conclusion of Part 2, teachers prioritizing broken apart standards with a systemic (across the grade levels) mindset, need to do so using a process with two requirements that insure the results are based on everyone’s viewpoints and collective contributions to the decision-making process.

Being on the campus of four very different schools over the past six weeks has been amazing. These experiences have reminded me of the essential and central role that a school’s mission has in all facets of its governance, management, and operations.

Teachers and administrators often admit that they do not know their standards intimately. Why? Many share it is because they assume the purchased programs they use for classroom instruction accurately address what the standards expect in and across grade levels. In other words, if the program indicates that a particular standard is addressed in a unit or lesson (or series of units or lessons), the assumption is that the standard is addressed in its entirety, which is not necessarily the case!

In this article, I will propose a philosophy for educational leaders - that leads to a positive learning impact.

This motto made famous in Alexandre Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers”, harkens to a collective passion for making a team effort. In a curriculum-design context, the one represents a student’s systemic learning journey, which culminates with a momentous walk across a stage to receive a diploma. The all represents the collective educators who influence the student’s learning journey. This oftentimes includes forty to sixty-five teachers in a K-12 educational system (Jacobs, 2006). Maybe your school is smaller; and therefore, less teachers in a K-12 journey, the point is the same: all need to focus on the one.

​This phrase is attributed by the writer Benito Pérez Galdós to Ferdinand VII of Spain, who said it when he saw that one of his servants could not dress the monarch before an important meeting. "We have to go slowly because we are in a hurry" was also the phrase used as a lesson learned by a group of leaders to whom I facilitated a coordination dynamic recently.

What were schools like in Victorian times? Schools were undoubtedly different from the schools we have today.

Education in Victorian classrooms
Lessons were basic and focused on the 3 R's of Reading, wRiting & aRithmetic (Maths) with the introduction of religion and usually involved copying down what the teacher wrote on the chalkboard. Furthermore, children were expected to chant things out loud until they did so without mistakes.

​The timetables were commonly done this way; children were expected to do this smoothly. The importance of developing a delicate hand in writing was high, and alongside numbers, this was seen as a crucial part of Education.