Single Conversations: The Role Of Deaf Education In Bilingual Education

Susan Scott, the author of Fierce Conversations, wrote: “While no single conversation is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a career, a business, a relationship, or a life -- any single conversation can.” In the position of leadership, we naturally aim to make the positive changes to educational system, and we have to understand that any single conversation can make an actual impact on the trajectory of educational reforms. While there are a number of desired reforms in our educational system, Deaf education has its own struggles and hardships, and there’s one inevitable issue in Deaf education: the effects of various home language environments on academic excellence. Some Deaf students use American Sign Language at home as their primary

Deaf schools feel more obliged to be in compliance with the law, and the definition of rigor in teaching changes. This impacts Deaf education vastly because most of Deaf children come to school without established language, yet teachers are expected to teach them from curriculum without building their language foundation. In fact, curriculums are generally designed for children with formal language established since birth. This is a crisis point of Deaf education where stakeholders in Deaf community are struggling with the idea of rigorous teaching in Deaf schools. To remove such barriers in Deaf schools, Blackburn and Williamson (2009) suggested that principals are responsible to build a shared understanding of rigor with all stakeholders including teachers and parents, and they must be in agreement with the characteristics of academic rigor before the school administration can create the school culture that the school community longs

Susan Scott (2017) emphasized that fierce conversations are not cruel, brutal, or angry conversations but rather are powerful and intense conversations. I believe that the school’s vision and mission is a starting place where we can start the fierce conversations with the whole community about the vision of our school and how it can align with academic rigor. Actually, what matters anywhere in a school community matters everywhere in a school community, and it requires effective communication to optimize dialogues among stakeholders . Susan Scott (2017) suggested one method that promotes dialogues within the school community: Beach Ball model. She compared an organization with a beach ball with six stripes of different colors. For the school community, each strip represents a specific group of people within the community, and every group stands on a different stripe experiencing reality from that perspective. For instance, a group of parents may be on the red stripe, students find themselves on the blue stripe, and teachers stand on the yellow stripe. Indeed, they are within the school community, but they experience reality from completely different perspective. Using that model, I can improve school’s vision and mission where a shared understanding of rigor is