Great Game Plans won't Work with Poor Fundamentals

All the players in the world won't help the football team if they collectively don't know how to block. Great defensive schemes won’t work if your players can't tackle. If you can't run, throw, and catch, you might as well forget going back to the drawing board to find a new play to help you win the game.

How does this analogy apply to schools?  Curriculum is a plan, but plans don’t work if they are being carried out by those with poor fundamentals. Bottom line, curriculum is worthless in the hands of an educator who can't manage children. Formative assessments will never work in a classroom that fails to engage minds and inspire excellence. Interventions will never work for kids in a classroom with ineffective instruction. 

The key to winning any game successfully requires every player to possess the basic fundamentals of guaranteeing excellence in their performance.  In education, instructional fundamentals in every teacher are the foundation of academic excellence in every chid.  But the secret to winning the learning game does not rests in the hands of simply one or two "all star" educators while everyone else plays a secondary role. Every educator must possess the fundamentals and talent to perform at high levels in order to get all kids into the end zone we call excellence. 

 To accomplish this lofty goal, leaders must transform into coaches and create systems that give all educators the basic fundamentals that lead to excellence. In other words, leaders must create intervention systems for teachers in the same manner they would for struggling students and pervasive professional learning plans to grow the rest. If this can be the goal of all school leaders, the success of every school and ultimately every student would be found in the collective efficacy in the team, not the contributions of just a few all star performers.