As I finish the teacher leadership course, I am struck by my position. By that I mean that I am always one of the people in my building who speaks out about change, new initiatives, good learning, new ideas. I have participated on the textbook adoption committee and on the curriculum committees. Yet, I don't feel like I've really spoken out about the changes that I feel are most important for students in the new era. Maybe it's because I didn't feel like I knew much about these coming changes before this program, but I feel like I have been treading water. For example, I know that I am a believer in curriculum reform. We teach essentially the same English curriculum every year, and in the style of the Sabertooth Curriculum, we add layers of complexity to the same ideas. This doesn't serve the students of tomorrow very well. Nor does our current AP initiative, which pushes students to take highly advanced curriculum work in unrelated areas to their fields of interest, with the hope of getting into elusive "dream schools."

If this change starts somewhere, I am working to make it start with me. I am going to develop a new kind of instructional delivery for my course this summer and show that it can be done; that students can learn in an online or blended format, that they can use analytical writing in courses other than English, that the curriculum for yearbook requires as much intensity in thinking skills and software skills as the curriculum for their fourth year of high school English.