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Here are some answers to your questions.

1) How do you assess for your desired end without changing the bureaucracy?

Work with everyone involved with the student (parent, classroom teachers, guidance counselors, psychologist, etc.)! I get to use positive interventions and strengths approaches with people who don’t even know it sometimes. Everyone who feels they have a stake in the case can have a voice. Since I work directly with the student, any positive and self-efficacious outcomes that make the work of all of those stakeholders easier (fewer meetings, e-mails, accommodations…) is usually welcome.

It can be tough at the beginning, but progress is usually only turned down by people who have a vested interest in the student failing. (Unfortunate but it happens.) Everyone likes to take credit for a success! If you are in special ed, you will have to follow the IEP, but you also get to have a fair amount of leeway in how you reframe the directions, materials and outcomes for a student.

2) How do you as a classroom teacher change the culture positively?

This is often very frustrating for people who are not positional leaders. Principals and superintendents are, by the nature of the beast, the “big picture” people. It can seem like a soft or fuzzy approach to increase student well-being when AYP says they need higher math and reading scores that you can measure-measure-measure. My advice to you would be to choose the school where you will work VERY carefully. Find a principal and SpEd director who share with you their vision for a higher achieving school. Find out how they think that happens. Want to make a difference now? Don’t rule out an independent school where your creativity can be less at odds with NCLB.

Meanwhile, there are lots of cool ways to integrate strengths approaches into the classroom. I have even turned positive therapy models into journaling assignments where the students learn to assess the underlying motivation for character behavior. Kids love to give advice to characters who don’t “get it”, and they learn about some of the mechanisms in the article above in the process. Having lots of flexible tools in your teaching kit is essential. A good sense of humor is probably mandatory if you are working with adolescents!

The burning question is how do you assess for your desired end (better student learning and performance and ultimately happiness) without a lot of permission slips, administration buy-in, parental buy-in and student willingness to accurately self-report? Put another way, how do you as a classroom teacher change the culture positively?