.5 PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS

As you recall, the first category we dealt with was the differentiation in staff hierarchy and the second was the category of the horizontal specialization. The third is professional relationships, how to deal with other professionals in different categories. Example: teachers have to deal with administrators. So one specific skill you have to have as a professional teacher is how to deal with other administrators. Another kind of skill is how to deal with supervisors. Administrators are the lawgivers and supervisors who are theoretically there to help you. Another professional category is the staff developers, the ones who know how to help teachers obtain new skills and are able to apply them. If this were a staff development session, we would have to follow up this lecture presentation with some opportunities for you to practice until you understand the new concept. Its not the kind of thing where you get an expert to blow into town, give you a lecture on a topic, and then leave you just sitting there looking in your notebooks.

District administrators - Important players with whom you will share professional relationships. They are different from building administrators in that you don't have daily relationships with them but you have to know the direction they're going so you can anticipate what to do.

Parents and community leaders either. Learning to deal with them is a big part of learning how to make things work better.

Teacher unions - An important factor in the professional relationship field. There are different unions to choose from, namely the NEA, SVEA, and AF of T. You have to figure out what your relationship is to a teachers union or other professional associations like the math teacher's association or the elementary teachers association, or the urban teachers association or the Montessori association to name a few. You also need to learn how to deal with universities. After you become a teacher, hopefully you'll still want to deal with universities, not only for your own education, but as a resource for schools and their professional development. A good example of school/University partnership is the PRIME project in Norfolk. As a PRIME intern, one task is working in the six special schools that have a special relationship with ODU and the community. Through PRIME, ODU has arranged for the Navy to enter into a 10-year partnership with PRIME to supply mentors to the six prime schools on duty time.

The relationship between state departments of education and teachers is often not well defined. Teachers tend to blame state departments of education for many regulations, even though they don't understand the fine points them. Most teachers rely on administrators to tell them what regulations they need to pay attention to, which are okay, but it's not okay as a professional because you're just doing something that someone else tells you without knowing yourself. I think that puts you in a weak position.

Funding agencies present another relationship for teachers to develop. More and more, teachers have to get involved in the grants game. I don't like that because it distracts teachers from what they ought to be doing. It takes time to hustle for grants. But that's the name of the game these days, and if you don't go out and hustle grants, your school won't have as many resources. Bad system, isn't it? But that's the system.

Support staff - The people who serve as the go-betweens to make things happen. I can deal directly with the bus people, or I can have someone who is the coordinator of field trips so they can really make things happen for everybody's field trips. If you're on your own and you have to make all of the preparations for field trips, then you won't take too many. However, if there's a facilitator, then you will. In the same way, guest speakers are support staff but they also need to be facilitated. For example, it would really enrich almost any class I can think of to have a submariner come and talk to a bunch of secondary students. They would really like that, and you could relate it to almost anything and any subject in the curriculum. It's an intrinsically interesting thing for kids to have someone who's been on a real submarine come to their class. Do you realize that that's really easy to do here in Hampton Roads? The average teacher wouldn't know how to go about making that happen, and by the time you spend a couple of hours figuring it out, you're not going to do that very often, are you? You really have to have a bug in your bun and really want a submariner to come and be willing to spend hours getting it organized. But if you had someone organized to facilitate guest speakers, then you could go make a request from that person and it would be taken care of. Then teachers would make many more requests for guest speakers.

Security and monitoring personnel present an interesting challenge. The teacher should know how to use security personnel when they need them. They should be able to alert staff to dangerous situations and foresee difficulties.

	There are many people and institutions that teachers need to build relationships with other than just their students and principal. What are some examples of these?	Answer Here
	No ferret question	Answer Here