10 Things

Araceli Hernandez

August 2, 2009

EDAD 5383

10 things I would have changed

When I first heard that we would have to interview our principals or any one that we knew as assistant principals. I thought to myself this is not going to be and easy task for me since, I work with a principal who is not much for staff improvement. So I went ahead and took this challenge anyway. I took the risk and asked my principal these questions and her reply was: “BUSY, BUSY, BUSY, etc. she wrote these words twenty times on my reply. So instead of me getting upset about this whole thing I took it upon myself to mention it to some of my classmates. I soon found out that good people still exists in this world. My good ole friend Dina, who is a counselor happen to know a woman by the name of Mary Ann Benavides, she is the assistant principal at Dorothy Smith Pullen Elementary School in Rockwall, TX. So Dina gave me her information and I was able to interview Ms. Benavides.

When I interviewed her she was very happy that I had been able to use her as and interviewee. She said that she was very happy that the University was having us do something like this and that she wished that she would have had the opportunity to do the same herself. Some of the things that Ms. Benavides mentioned to me were that:

❖ The first thing that she would have changed would be to plan team building into the beginning of the back to school. She said “this was a huge mistake because teachers are naturally social creatures, and they did not have this opportunity to get back into the swing of things with fun. The following year we had a full day of team building in which all school staff were included and assigned to groups. This was a great start to a new school year.”

❖ The second thing she mentioned she would have changed was, “to have a nuts and bolts handbook. She said that her principal doesn’t feel it is necessary, but she thinks it is. She said that she is not looking...