The Principalship which written by Sergiovanni is about the key improvements or the concepts of managing the school, institute or organization and being a good leadership for the principalship. In chapter 11 (Making Standards work), I find very interesting concepts of it. This chapter is talking about how the state or ministry sets the successful
standards that work well in every school for the whole country or state. There is not much trouble in setting the standards but the most problems are about the ways to implement it and how to make those standards work well and appropriate for every corner of the whole state or country. Fortunately, there are also the suggested solutions from the author of this book.
As can be seen in this chapter, I interested in the lifeworld of schooling which has more effect on making the standard work. Setting the standard has to be involved from the ground floor or the bottom up. Especially, the lifeworld of each school or local community really have the strong effect in setting the standard. So to make the standard work, we have to set it appropriately up to time, place, and situation of each local community. And we test the standard to make sure that it will work in many condition and situation before we implement it. When we standardize the school standard to all school in the whole state or country, we expect that all school will meet the standard we set; however, the standard cannot be work well with all school if the standards are set by the states alone. So the state, school boards, parents, teachers, and students equally reasonable in setting standard. That the reason we include the alternative standard in setting the standard so that it can facilitate each community to share purpose, aim, and goal from their different perspectives and cultures to develop an appropriate standard that fit with every school for the whole country.
For real situation, the Cambodian educational system just rise up from the civil war, from one school to one school, from local to another are really not the same including quality, quantity, and lifeworld. Some schools in rural area are different from the city; therefore, if the ministry set the standard without thinking of the situation of each or every school, the standard will fail to implement it or only achieve in the some places. For example, the Cambodian Ministry of Education has tried to adopt the ITC in education reform in the nation of Cambodia but there are many problems impacting implementation. To my reflection, I know that the ICT cannot well implement in every school in the whole country because there are differences within the local. Some locals can access the electricity and some cannot. Most teachers and staffs in rural area are not familiar with new technology. So in order to make the ICT work in implementation, the ministry has to understand the situation of the locals. They should provide the professional trainer to each local and technical support materials.
For another example, The Cambodian ministry of education tries to adopt the student centered approaches in science teaching in Cambodia. The program is not successful in implementing because of the lifeworld, culture or situations of each local school are different. The student center approach can work well in the city school because there are many available human resource, enough equipment like tables and chairs and appropriate classroom, especially the number of students in the classroom, for example, 25 students per classroom. Then, this approach could be implemented well. But in the rural area, those things might not be easily access because there are a lot of students but lack of teacher or classroom so one class must be forced to have over amount of students in one class. For instance, one classroom contains 40-50 students so the student center approach cannot work with this amount of student. It is going to be messy. Sometimes teachers do not have strong knowledge about this approach. In addition, rural schools still use old tables and chairs, then it cannot move and do the students center approach. Therefore, the ministry should know the culture and situation of every local school before setting up one standard or approach to be implemented.
In sum up, to make standard work, we have to understand the requirement of every part of the local need and its situation. One standard can be well implemented unless there are the involvements from bottom as local schools, local teachers, students, and the local community. Therefore, the lifeworld of the schooling have to be the most considerably priority in making the standard work.