STANDARD FOUR
Human Resource Leadership- Creates a professional learning community aligned with school improvement plan; implements processes to recruit, hire, and mentor quality, high-performing staff; uses multiple assessments to evaluate teachers and other staff members fairly.
Click on each button to view my artifacts, after reading the description below.
*Certain artifacts have restricted access for confidentiality purposes.
Click on each button to view my artifacts, after reading the description below.
*Certain artifacts have restricted access for confidentiality purposes.
4A Professional Development and Learning Communities
The school executive ensures that the school is a professional learning community.
At my residency school, I worked with the PBIS/Intervention chairs, as well as the MTSS coach to create a document that teachers could constantly refer to as a guide for effective classroom management. Then I arranged for the MTSS coach to deliver three different professional learning session (one session for each section of the guide: Prevent, Teach, Respond) during grade level PLT meetings.
I worked with all of my cohort members to create a years worth of professional development around poverty. There are eight different sessions, including: An Introduction Session, Budget: Bias and Assumptions, Family Awareness and Engagement, Instructional Design, Interview Protocol, Looking Up Data, Relationships Strategies, and Resources. I delivered this professional development to staff members at my school who chose this during our school Ed Camp sessions.
I lead the Carroll Equity committee. During our committee meetings we addressed topics such as what equity is, implicit bias, the WCPSS Cultural Responsiveness Framework, and diverse hiring practices. We also educated the students at Carroll about what equity is, and we launched a student equity team. This committee was one of the action steps for the social/emotional indicator on our school improvement plan. Staff members had the option as to whether or not they participated in this committee.
In order to provide on-sight coaching, the math specialist and I would go into math classrooms each week to conduct observations, provide specific and timely feedback, and model effective teaching practices for teachers throughout the school year. I worked with my mentor principal and executive coach to create this tool to celebrate the work teachers were doing, as well as providing them with ideas and questions to help improve their craft. Many of the ideas that I got were from the Total Participation Guide from ASCD, as well as strategies I learned from Open Up Resources Productive Struggle Training.
During my residency, I was part of a small group of instructional leaders that learned about the Empower Learning Platform before showing other staff members how to use this platform in their PLT meetings and during teacher workdays. While instructing other teachers on how to use this technology tool, our small team of leaders created a question/answer document for teachers. If our team didn't know the answers to questions, then we would reach out directly to the team members at Empower. This document allowed for teacher input in planning how the professional learning time around was used and what content was covered when learning about this new platform.
4B- Recruiting, Hiring, Placing, and Mentoring Staff
The school executive establishes processes and systems in order to ensure high quality, high performing staff.
I worked with another fellow in my program to create a video to communicate why individuals should go into teaching. The video features clips of teachers talking about why they love teaching, and it also features students talking about how teachers have influenced their lives. The purpose of this video is to recruit individuals into the teaching profession because there is currently a shortage of teachers in North Carolina. In my future endeavors as a school leader, I could see myself having this video set-up at my table when participating in the teacher job fair. It may also be a great video to share with seniors at local high schools and with local colleges with teacher preparation programs.
During my residency, I participated in several interviews for various positions. This artifact includes the questions and responses to one of the interviews that I participated in. Hiring quality candidates is critical because your staff are the drivers of your school's vision and school improvement plan. Without quality staff, high student achievement is unlikely. When hiring, it is important to put together a diverse hiring committee with clear expectations for the interviewing/screening process.
I created a staffing plan during my residency that highlights the name of each staff member, the role they serve in, areas that they are certified in, total years of experience, total years at my residency school, gender, and race. When placing staff members, it is important to create diverse team with varying amounts of expertise, gender, and race in order for you staff to grow students and each other. With that said, this document should be referenced and utilized when hiring new staff members and when placing current staff members onto different teams.
During the fall semester of my residency, I assessed the current Human Resources practices being conducted at my building, including the mission/vision, student/teacher demographics, Teacher Working Conditions survey results, recruitment, selection, induction/orientation, staff development, supervision/evaluation, and instruction time. Then I analyzed each of these components based on the information that I learned throughout my Human Resources Class and created my own plan for all of these components. In my future role as a school leader, I will continuously reference this plan, modifying it as I continue to learn and grow.
4C- Teacher and Staff Evaluations
The school executive evaluates teachers and other staff in a fair and equitable manner with the focus on improving performance, and, thus student achievement.
At the beginning of my residency, I attended the Evaluation Plan Work Session with one of the assistant principals at my school. The purpose of this session was to learn how to set-up a school evaluation plan for the year. We also learned how to fill-out the teach observation tool in a fair and equitable manner, so that as leaders we can honestly and sincerely celebrate each staff member's success, but also provide them with feedback to improve their performance, as well. The attached artifact is the certificate, indicating that I successfully completed this professional learning session.
The teacher evaluation tool encompasses several different standards and sub-standards making it challenging to evaluate staff in a fair and equitable manner with the focus on improving performance. Therefore, during my residency the administration team worked together to condense each standard into key indicators that we are looking for when evaluating teachers in each standards. The document that contains these indicators is called the Carroll Classroom. This document encompasses all of the aspects that our team feels will provide students with a relevant, rigorous and meaningful education, which is the mission of Wake County. According to this document, admin looks for data informed planning, engagement through targeted instruction, content through 4 C's and real world connections, student engagement, professional growth and responsibilities, and implementation of our magnet theme when evaluating teachers. This document is presented and gone over thoroughly at the beginning of the year staff meetings and referenced several times during all pre-conferences and post-conferences.
During my residency, I completed several observations alongside my principal mentor and the assistant principals in the building. I also completed an observation cycle with my executive coach, in which she coached me on how to use effective questioning when conducting the pre conferences and post conferences with teachers. I have attached one of the observation cycles I completed independently using the state's current teacher evaluation rubric. I also included questions and responses from the pre conference and post conference that were held. You can find more of the observations/evaluations that I conducted in the Principal Residency Section of my Weebly.