STANDARD ONE
Strategic Leadership- creates and shares a vision, challenges the status quo, utilizes data, facilitates development of annual school improvement plans, facilitates implementation of state education policy, sets goals so students can reach them, communicates strong beliefs based on latest research and best practices, and creates processes to distribute leadership.
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.
1A- School Vision, Mission, and Strategic Goals
The school's identity, in part, is derived from the vision, mission, values, beliefs and goals of the school, the processes used to establish these attributes, and the ways they are embodied in the life of the school community.
Vision of self as a leader displays what I have learned about school leadership thus far in the program, and what I envision myself as when I am an effective school leader. It is important to always begin with the end in mind. The end being your vision, which is why you lead in the way you do throughout your journey.
Portrait of a Leader is a one-page graphic that defines me as a leader. The assignment is based on the UBD (Understanding by Design) model. I started with what I wanted my final outcome to be as a leader, as well as an outline of my learning plan that breaks down how I will arrive to that outcome. This portrait will stay in my office, as a visual reminder for decisions that I will make in this leadership role, as all of my actions steps in some way connect back to my vision.
This is my personal leadership statement that describes my core beliefs, values, and behaviors; my why for education and educational leadership; and what I expect of myself and my team. In hindsight, this provides a more in depth look at my vision to help understand why vision is what it is.
I started Underwood Elementary School's first Equity Team. This team was made up of staff members who were interested in serving on this committee. Using the open-narrow-close protocol, I lead the team in collaboratively creating a vision for the school/team that was centered around equity, which directly aligns with my personal vision as a leader.
1B- Leading Change
The school executive articulates a vision, and implementation strategies for improvements and changes, which result in improved achievement for all students.
Through careful observation, I created a model that begins with a goal. Then I mapped out student outcomes that let me know that the goal has been met. Finally, I created strategies and activities that would need to occur at my school in order to achieve the goal. My model clearly models the understanding by design model, and it models a process that all leaders should go through each year when leading a school.
My data project was focused on Underwood Elementary, where I taught for 13 years. I gathered various data points, both quantitative and qualitative. Then I generated tables or graphs to visually display the day. Finally, I used the data points to tell a story about Underwood Elementary in various formats, including: an essay, slide presentation, and info-graphic. Data should be at the forefront of all decisions made when leading a school. It is much easier to defend the decisions that you are making and getting your followers to buy into those decisions when you clearly present them with the right data.
1C-School Improvement Plan
The school improvement plan provides the structure of the vision, values, goals, and changes necessary for improved achievement for all students.
Using my school's existing data, I picked an area that needs improvement and wrote an improvement goal, using the SMART goal format. When crafting a school improvement plan, it is once again important that you start with writing your goals and that your goals align with your vision. Once again you are beginning with the end of mind, so you need to make sure that you are using a backwards design approach. Once your goals are clearly written in a collaborative format, then you write clear measurable action steps that have timelines attached to them. Action steps/key processes should be distributed to different members of the school improvement team, making process very collaborative throughout.
While I was teaching at Underwood Elementary, I attended several professional development sessions on Conscious Discipline. Then, I analyzed the different components of this session based on the what I learned about effective adult learning strategies in my School Improvement Class. Every school improvement goal should have professional development for staff as one of it's action steps. As a leader, you can't expect to reach your goal, if your staff does not have a solid understanding of how to reach that goal. Providing professional development is also not enough. You have to also collect data continuously to make sure that the professional development put into place is yielding the desired outcomes.
At the end of my School Improvement Class, I wrote a reflection in regards to the key ideas that I learned throughout the semester, including: transforming school culture, the importance of having a growth mindset, addressing conflict in schools, and how to plan effective professional development that matches the need(s) of the school. All of these ideas are ones that I will need to have at the forefront as a school leader, which is why it is crucial that I am reflecting continuously on these components throughout the school year.
I served on the Carroll School Improvement Team as an indicator manager for two different indicators; the standards aligned instruction indicator and the social emotional indicator. As an indicator manager, I helped personalize professional learning surrounding the competencies for new and returning staff, and I monitored acceleration of classes in the Empower Learning platform. I also led the equity committee in revamping their goals to better align with Carroll's vision statement, created a student equity team, and created a weeks worth of My Learning Lessons for the whole school that taught students about equity.
1D-Distributive Leadership
The school executive creates and utilizes processes to distribute leadership and decision-making throughout the school.
I created an artifact that reiterates my core beliefs, values, and behaviors. My artifact also states what I expect from myself as a leader, along with what I expect from the people that I am leading. I described how I saw the teacher pipeline at the school that I taught at, and I evaluated that teacher pipeline. Finally, I created my own teacher pipeline for my future school, explaining how I would distribute leadership opportunities at my school.
I worked with two other fellows in my program to create a presentation educating other school leaders about what distributive leadership is. The presentation could be delivered to principals, assistant principals, and/or members of your school improvement team. The professional development presentation also includes a card sort activity that teaches participants about the different ways you can distribute leadership in your school building, as well as who the different stakeholders are when distributing leadership. Distributive leadership is a way to make your organization more collaborative, as you empower the other stakeholders in your school building.
I attended and participated in grade level PLT meetings for each grade level bi-weekly. Grade level PLT meetings are led by the grade level chair. They also create the agenda for the meeting. The artifact attached is all of the agendas/minutes of the 7th grades meetings.
At my residency school, each grade level is broken up into three teams, consisting of four 4 core subject area teachers (math, science, social studies, and language arts) and either an ESL teacher or special education teacher. These core teams meet for PLT meetings every other week and are led by the core team lead. The core team lead also creates the agenda. Core team PLT meetings mostly consist of planning of behavioral expectations and kid talk. I circulate from team to team and contribute as needed. I also audit the minutes from their meetings, which means I read over their minutes and provided feedback.
Content PLT meetings also occur bi-weekly, in which teachers meet within their own grade level that all teach the same subject. For example, all of the 6th grade math teachers meet together for this meeting or all of the 7th grade science teachers meet for their meeting. Teams work together to create their agendas. For the most part agendas are focused on analyzing data from common assessments to drive the planning of future content. Teachers also look at common assessment data to drive their intervention block, which is known as Team Time. This is a 20 minute block of time in which students are grouped based on performance on an assessment that is aligned with a specific power standard. Throughout the school year I went to all of the science PLTs, since science was the content area that I had the least knowledge on when I began my residency.
Department meetings also occur monthly, in which all teachers and specialists that teach the same content are meet altogether. The department heads create the agendas and lead the meetings. Department meetings focus on showing teachers how to locate content and resources for their subject area, county level announcements for their departments, vertical alignment planning, and content specific professional learning. I attended and contributed to all of the math department meetings during my residency because my problem of practice was focused on increasing student engagement and discourse in math classrooms.
Department meetings also occur monthly, in which all teachers and specialists that teach the same content are meet altogether. The department heads create the agendas and lead the meetings. Department meetings focus on showing teachers how to locate content and resources for their subject area, county level announcements for their departments, vertical alignment planning, and content specific professional learning. I attended and contributed to all of the math department meetings during my residency because my problem of practice was focused on increasing student engagement and discourse in math classrooms.
I worked with the administrative team to put together this roles and responsibilities document which highlights responsibilities for each administrator; who the department heads, grade level leads, and team leads are; and what committee each staff member serves on. Staff members indicate their interest to take on certain roles and responsibilities, as well as what committee they want to serve on in a beginning of the year survey prior to the first teacher workday of the school year. Then the administrative team works together to determine who will assume each role and responsibility based on the survey results, experience, and performance. Staff members automatically get to serve on the committee that they have selected on the beginning of the year survey. They can choose to serve on more than one committee, but they must at least serve on one committee in order to be connected to the school improvement plan.