Month: December 2010

IA01 – Schoolwide Vision

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Introduction
In order to complete this activity, I interviewed two principals at my current school. The first, JM, is in his second year as an Assistant Principal. He has worked in education for over ten years and this is his first full-time administrative position. I also interviewed AH, our Head of School, which is in his 16th year of school administration. I interviewed JM first and it was only after the second interview that I began to see contrasts between the two that lead to interesting conclusions about the changes in perspective that come with experience and the difference they lead to in vision.

When I asked JM to describe his schoolwide vision, his answer parroted much of the language found in the official, published school mission statement; he even made reference to the published version which was hanging on his office wall. And, when I followed up by asking him how he facilitated that vision, he began with references to the professional goals he established at the start of the school year with his immediate supervisor. He explained that he uses various tools to manage faculty and students so that they and he can meet specific guidelines of maximum discipline events, minimum attendance issues, etc. He gave other examples but, in retrospect, his perspective was entirely practical.

To generalize, I would say that JM, in his second year of school leadership, concerned himself with only the practical issues of the functioning of the school, the nuts and bolts that kept classes operating day-to-day.

I was not, however, aware of this general trend at the time. Rather, it was after my next interview that these trends became obvious to me. The second interview was with our Head of School and, when I shared the sort of answers I had gotten from JM, he smiled and explained that he was unsurprised since that sort of technical, practical answers were exactly what he would expect from somone still learning administration.

AH told me that he had been the same way early in his career but now that has has more experience and responsibility, his vision has changed; he now concerns himself with issues out on the horizon, leaving day-to-day concerns to his Principals. When I asked for examples, he told me that, of the time he spends on budgets, roughly 30% of that time is spent on the current year’s schedule; he spends the bulk of his time thinking about next year’s and beyond.

Moving on, I asked AH about how he shares his schoolwide vision with others. He told me that while, early in his career he did quite a bit of speech-making, direct instruction and modeling, he had begun to embrace multi-media communications, media presentations and other methodologies to communicate complex ideas related to his vision.

He shared an interesting example with me by contrasting the recent announcements of infidelity by celebreties David Letterman and Tiger Woods. He pointed out that, by controling the message, Letterman excaped unscathed while, on the same television network, news organizations literally destroyed Woods’s personal and professional life. “The presentation of a message can dwarf and distort the reality,” he said and, while that is a scary idea, it’s applicabilty to school vision is important.

ISLLC Standard I states that a school leader must steward a vision of learning that is shared and supported by the school community and, the more clearly that vision is shared –and the more complex it is– the better off all stakeholders are. AH pointed out to me the difference that experience can bring in this regard and inspired me to try to move up that learning curve as quickly as possible by learning from the expereinces of others rather than relying on only my own..

IA11 – School Improvement Plan

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At the end of the 2009-2010 school year, one of the key areas identified for improvement in my school was growth in reading comprehension in our lower school. Our school administers the MAP test three times a year to measure growth over time and, while our end-of-year scores are satisfactory, only 45% of our students show above-average growth in math when compared to the national average and the goal was set to raise that number to at least 65%.

The issue was identified at the start of the 2010-2011 school year and faculty were told of the focus on this subject area in grades 2-5. Over the summer a new curricular program had been indentified (The Columbia Teachers College Reading and Writing Workshop) and teachers were introuduced to it at orientation. Three teachers had been to training over the summer months and they were each tasked with groups of teachers to train and mentor in the program. The first administration of the MAP exam was used as a baseline measurement and work begin in earnest to help students progress in reading comprehension before the second administration in December.

It is important to note that the new program was put into place in other grades as well and was not used simply as a way to raise scores this year for this test to achieve this goal. The school has made a long-term investment in adopting the Workshop and the benefits go far beyond reading comprehension scores in grades 2-5.

Informational meetings were held for parents over several weeks to introduce the program, several guest speakers came to campus to speak to families and train teachers and a bi-monthly newsletter had been produced and emailed to families dealing specifically with the workshop. The new aproach has quickly become part of the fabric of the school and, I am happy to report, the December administration of the MAP test saw over 70% of our students with above average growth since the first round of testing, meeting the first stage of the stated goal.

It was an impressive implementation of a specific School Improvement Goal, well considered, well-researched and effective.

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IA08—Interdisciplinary Teams

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Our school has spent the last 24 months in preparation for a major new curriculum initiative and interdisciplinary teams have been critical to the process. Teams have been formed to evaluate different curricular areas and were, on purpose, comprised people who teach different grade levels and subject areas. The idea was to get broad perspectives on each content area and reorganize it as needed for the new system. Specialized knowledge of a particluar content area, it was decided, would slow the teams down and was unnecessary since the new system is content-agnostic. In order to complete the activity, I observed several of these teams meeting at various times.

From a cynical perspective, it is easy to equate shared ownership with a lack of personal investment. However, my observations showed me that, often, being too close to an issue renders one incapable of making fair evaluations or taking effective action.

For example, I observed a team discussion of which texts would be used in a Language Arts unit in the middle school. The team members all took their responsibility seriously, but not one of them had ever taught Language Arts, and only one was a middle school teacher. While watching them evaluate the choices before them, I recalled my years as a member of a high school English department and the hours I spent embroiled in debates with my colleagues over which Shakesperian play we would teach in a particular year or how someone could even suggest that we remove a particular work from a course’s reading list.

Watching these professionals dispassionately research and evaluate the choices before them and make a quick decision amazed me; it was all I could do to keep from jumping in to argue with them on behalf of a personal favorite, but, I realized, their choices were sound. One need not be an experienced English teacher to know that To Kill a Mockingbird is an excellent novel to teach; they did fine without my input, demonstrating that sharing ownership for curriculum outside of the specific subject area is effective and that interdisciplinary team meetings are more efficient than individual teacher planning.

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IA07 – All-Staff Meetings

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Introduction

In order to complete this activity, I interviewed two principals, JM and NH following our most recent high school faculty meeting. I also observed the meeting and, afterwards, interviewed two teachers, JE and JC. though our discussions were varied and far-ranging, I tried to keep them focused on how they all felt the time of the meeting was spent, specifically considering if it was focused on the accomplishment of the school’s stated mission and student achievement.

Findings

I’m afraid that nobody feels we’re doing very well.

When I asked one of the teachers if he thought the time he spent at faculty meetings was well-invested, he actually laughed. He explained that “everybody” knows that meetings are a waste of time and that hadn’t been to a productive faculty meeting in years. The second teacher I spoke with said similar things though she didn’t seem to be quite as cynical about it.

Surprisingly, both of the principals gave me similar answers. JM told me that faculty meetings aren’t really about acacomplishing the mission, rather, he said, they are for “nuts and bolts and nitty-gritty,” meaning details of policy and procedure. When I told him that I was going to have to produce an agenda for a faculty meeting that “engages all staff in the fulfillment of the school’s mission,” he became interested and volunteered to help me with the project.

The Agenda

Our school’s mission says that we seek to, “create a nurturing, respectful and academically inspiring environment in which faculty guide students to attain their maximum potential, become lifelong learners and thinkers, develop high moral standards, respect diversity, and make meaningful contributions as citizens.” When you consider that the agenda for our most recent meeting included a discussion of Discipline Referral Forms and a preview of interruptions to the regular schedule over the coming weeks, it’s easy to see how we lose sight of the mision. However, what JM and I realized was that, with the right approach and perspective, these need not be true.

We chose to keep the same two items on the agenda for our imaginary meeting but to attempt to frame them in mission-specific language. So that, for example, instead of a discussion of Discipline Forms, JM should have chaired a workshop on “Using the Discipline Point System to maintain high moral standards.” Because, once we recognize that teaching morality is a mission-specific goal, then the obligation to maintain discipline becomes a moral imperitave that our mission demainds of us; it’s just as critical as teaching arithmatic!

The same is true of alerting faculty to changes in the schedule. If our mission demands that we help students make “meaningful contributions as citizens,” then the interruption of our regular class schedule for assemblies on charitable programs or field trips to do service learning activities become less burdonsome and more integral to the work we’re doing in class.

WIth the right approach, faculty members can begin to see themselves less as specialists working around a series of obstacles and more as partners with each other in accomplishing a grand goal. When a faculty works hard, it can become so distracted by what JM called the “nuts and bolts” of teaching that it becomes blind to the whole picture. That’s what a school mission is for: it can be used to paint all activities with the same brush, reminding us all that we are in fact using our time to do something important together.

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IA05 – New Teacher Orientation

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Introduction

In order to complete this activity I met with my school’s Human Resources Director, AB, the Lower School Principal, DA, and considered my own orientations as both a new and veteran teacher at my school. During our interviews we discussed what was effective from both of our perspectives, what changes were made year-to-year, whether those changes achieved the desired results and the philosophical ideas behind them.
I then went away and created an agenda for a single-day new teacher orientation and met again with each of them to discuss what I had come up with. The result is a plan which we hope to use for next year’s New Faculty Orientation.

After my discussions and much consideration of the various orientations I have participated in, I settled on a modest objective for a New Faculty Orientation: to make sure that new teachers feel at home in their new school. That sounds too simple but actually contains a number of elements. By the end of a day of orientation, faculty new to a school should:

  • Be familiar with the physical facililty. They should know where key locations (offices, restrooms, classrooms, resources, etc) are and where specific members of the administrative team can be found.
  • Have already met and know something about all new members of the faculty. Asking a new employee to meet an entire faculty in a single day is absurd. But asking him or her to get to know the other newcomers is more reasonable. It gives him or her some familiar faces on the first day and lets him or her know that he or she is not alone in facing a new environment. Being a new teacher in a school is daunting because everyone else –students as well as teachers– seems to know more than you. Knowing others are new also helps.
  • Have met and gotten to know at least one veteran member of the faculty. Knowing and being able to find at least one resource person is a great comfort to a new teacher.
  • Be familiar with basic policies and procedures.

These four goals, all designed to make the new teacher feel at home in a new environment, can be accomplished in a single day’s orientation using the following agenda.

The Agenda

  • 8:00 – 8:30 AM – Breakfast
  • 8:30 – 9:00 AM – Welcome by Head of School, Director of HR and Principals
  • 9:00 – 10:30 AM – Scavenger Hunt
  • 10:30 – 11:00 AM – Debrief
  • 11:00 – 12:00 PM – Presentation A by Department Head (Lesson Plans, Syllabi
  • 12:00  – 12:45 – Lunch
  • 12:45-1:30 PM – Presentation B by Department Head (Schedules, Procedures)
  • 1:30 – 2:30 PM – Vertical Team Meeting
  • 2:30 – 3:30 PM – Horizontal Team Meeting

    First and foremost, this agenda is of equal value to brand new teachers and veteran teachers in a new school. There are no sessions on methodolgies or theory; those discussions can happen at another time.

    Breakfast: An informal breakfast gives people the chance to get inside, get settled and make a friend or two with little pressure. Since everyone in the room is new, no cliques will form and administrators will have an opportunity to introduce themselves to people informally. Looking back at my last orientation in a new school, this sort of breakfast helped me meet people who turned into close friends and colleagues; the informal, comfortable atmosphere set the tone for the entire day.

    Welcome by Head of School, HR and Admins: Once breakfast has ended, a formal welcome by the Head of School will gather the group and their attention. No speech is required, but since the HoS sets the tone and mission for the institution, it is fitting that he or she is given the chance to share that vision with the new faculty right away. Presumably the HR Director has met all new members of the faculty and may, in fact, be the only employee they all know. Familiar faces are important. Finally, giving the Principals a chance to intoruduce themselves to the group gives new teachers an important first resource to get questions answered.

    Scavenger Hunt: I scoffed at this idea when I saw it on my first Orientation schedule but, once it began, I recognized the value it has. Breaking the group of new teachers up into small, informal teams makes it even easier for them to make friends. Then each team is given a map and a list of objectives, such as a band-aid signed by the School Nurse, a Tardy Slip from the Attendance Office, an Add/Drop Form from the Guidance Office and a business card from each Principal. This forces the team members to work together to learn the “lay of the land.” It’s important to give each team enough time to complete the exercise without rushing and critical to debrief afterwards. Be seeing the successes of other teams, every member of the faculty will quickly learn what and who is where.

    Department Head Presentation: Moving into more formal sessions, it’s time for the faculty to meet in teams with their Department Head to cover some of the nitty-gritty. Breaking this long session into two parts with a lunch-break serves to dispell the tedium of what is a necessary but often boring exercise.

    Vertical and Horizontal Team Meetings: At this point the new faculty can join the veteral faculty for grade-level and subject-area meetings. This allows the new members of the team to get to know at least one of their veteral colleages and begin the work of integrating their new skills and presence into the established order of things. It also makes it clear from the start of the year that the entire faculty is expected to work as an integrated unit and establishes both the horizontal and vertical teams as working groups. 

    Following this agenda, a new group of teachers can quickly and efficiently be made to feel at home on an unfamiliar campus, meet each other and many members of the existing faculty and administration and begin the year successfully and confidently. They certainly have more to learn about the school but that can come later, at ongoing professional development sessions.

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    IA02 – Personal Vision

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    I believe that a school leader should strive to mold and shape the lives of young people, be an essential part of the development of the family unit and serve as a role model for both children and adults. An school leader must serve as a model of excellence for faculty, students and families and work in concert with the faculty on the development of individualized success among the students and faculty. He or she must be a teacher first and everything else second.

    In order to realize these goals at my school, I would focus my attention on three areas: the hiring and inspiring of an excellent faculty, the empowerment of a focused leadership team and the creation of a living relationship between my school and the community it services.

    A school is only as good as its weakest faculty member and great faculties make great schools. An school leader must attract and retain the finest faculty possible and create a professional learning community in which they can achieve success. I would create an environment of collegiality, cooperation and open exchange of successes and failures so that my teachers and administrators  could take advantage of each other as resources.

    Great school are managed by teams and, as a school leader, I would build an adminstrative team that meets often and openly, in frank and honest cooperative conversation leading to consensus. This team would accept input from as many consituencies as possible and develop a school vision that is specific, measurable and achieveable. 

    Finally, I recognize that, more than any other employee, the school leader serves as the living embodiement of his or her school’s values. Community involvement is a requirement of the job and an opportunity for success in the imporant tasks of building relationships, developing funding and achiving buy-in with the school’s vision.

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    IA12 – School Budgets

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    Introduction

    To complete this activity, I met with a number of teachers, the school’s Chief Operating Officer and considered my own experiences as a teacher and department head. We are a religious private school and, while we are not managed by a district or subject to union policies, we have a Board of Governors and formal guidelines for issues related to human resources.

    Evaluation of Budget-Management Practices

    It seems to me that the budgeting process at my school is sound and effective, especially in terms of implementation. As a private school, we have fairly considerable resources -especially for exciting and innovative programs- and our development staff keeps the school on sound financial footing. This has not always been true but a recent professionalization of that department has resulted in the current state of affairs.

    The school’s current COO is a remarkably capable and effective administrator. During our interview I told him that I feel one of his greatest strengths is his total lack of emotional investment in the school, and he laughed and thanked me. What I mean by this is that, since we are a religious school, many of our employees and administrators live in our school’s community and “eat, sleep and breathe it.” RQ, the COO, does not live in the community so his relationship to the school is purely professional. This perspective allows him a cool, detached view of the school’s affairs which allows him to be more effective than he might be otherwise.

    RQ enjoys a professional relationship with the school’s Board of Governors and, during the past year (his first on campus) he has succeeded in professionalizing their relationship with the school’s budget and his oversight of it. When I asked him to tell me about the political aspects of the budget process, he explained that there really was no political dimension and that he had eliminated it by creating consensus through a solid focus on the school’s mission and a respect for the Board Members’ time. “I don’t meet with the Board unless I’m asking them to make a decision,” he said. “I present data, educate them if necessary, then ask them to make a decision. They appreciate that effeciency.”

    As an example of this policy in action, he explained that he proposed a change recently to the school’s bylaws. Currently, the board must approve any expense greater than $10,000 which he feels is much too small to bother them with. His proposal was to raise that threshold to $50,000 and he expects them to approve it. His responsible application of the rules that exist has been a sea change and brought outdated rules like this one into the light.

    RQ told me that his watchword was value; this is the sole criteria he considers when approaching budget oversight. If a proposed expense provides a value comensurate with the expense, he approves it. “It really is that simple,” he explained.

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    IA13 – Technology Planning

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    Introduction

    This was a fairly easy activity for me to accomplish since I was promoted this year to Educational Technology Specialist and am now intimately involved in the school’s technology planning. While I am proud of some of the strides we have made this year, an examination of the ITSE technology standards makes it clear that we still have a long way to go. As an independent school, we’re free to chose our own path in this regard but a tendency to work on too short a timeline leads us to jump from project to project in a haphazard fashion.

    Assessment

    In the actual meaning of the term, no formal technlogy plan exists at the school. There is quite a bit of enthusaism and support for the integration of technology into our classrooms and we can often identify funding for exciting, visible projects, but they don’t really integrate into any long-term technology plan, though some effort is made to justify things after-the-fact.

    I meet regularly with two other people, the school’s Operations Manager and IT Manager, to discuss technology issues, but these meetings are primarily concerned with the management of problems and only rarely with moving forward. This internship activity forced me to confront these issues and, though the conclusions are uncomfortable, this has been a worthwhile and important reflection and learning process.

    Case Study I

    I am going to use a single issue as a case study to outline the challenges our technology planning process faces.

    Over two years ago, the IT Manager identified a shortcoming in the school’s IT infrastructure and recommended the school make a change to its data-storage, user-authentication and school-wide email solutions. Research was coducted and Google Apps were identified as the most promising solution. Over the two years since, very little progress has been made; the actual contracts have been negotiated and signed, but as of the start of the current academic year, nothing was implemented.

    We ran into two major conflicts at the start of the school year: staff training and branding/marketing.  Regarding training, I am amazed at the number of people who work with a computer every day and really don’t understand much about how they work. I have visited schools with effective technology training for their faculty and I’m jealous of their programs; it’s a long-term goal of ours to bring our entire faculty and staff more up-to-speed. But, in terms of our Google Apps rollout, simply helping people understand issues like why they should not use personal email accounts for school communication has been a significant challenge.

    Our second conflict is with our marketing department’s plan to change our school’s name sometime in the next 6-18 months. This change will affect our domain name decisions and, as such, is preventing us from moving ahead with the infrastructure-change. It’s caused some unanticipated problems across the board and is a prime example of how we tend to jump first and look later… and how that causes real problems.

    Case Study II

    Another piece of technology we’ve implemented recently has shown more promise and success. At the start of the current school year, we rolled out an addition to our school website that creates a back-end site into which parents, teachers and students can log in to access private content. This content includes gradebook information, pages for each class, online learning tools and communucation portals that have significantly affected our entire community.

    Here also, we could have done a much better job in planning, training and communicating, but even with our haphazard approach, we’ve seen real progress and success. Some teachers have taken the ball and run with ith, implementing online learning and assessment that we can point to as examples of where we would like the entire school to head… but others resist the changes and still more are confused or frightened by them.

    We scheduled a series of open-door training sessions for parents that drew no comers; it was a frustrating exercise that showed us that most people are either already engaged with us technologically or are not… and are not interested in being engaged until they encounter a problem. Finding a way to help those parents become more proactive and involved has been a real challenge.

    Reflection

    All in all, these two projects have opened my eyes to how far we have to go in terms of our Tecnnology Planning, but I am encouraged by how far we have come. The freedom our independent status gives us means that we can experiment in ways a more restricted school can’t and we can offer more options for our parents, students and staff. It’s an exciting prospect.

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    IA06 – Teacher Evaluation

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    Introduction

    In order to accomplish this activity, I experienced my own end-of-year evaluation as a classrom teacher and observed two others, each run by different Principals. This allowed me to see the school’s evaluation process be applied by three different administrators and, after each session, I interviewed both the teacher and administrator involved seperately.

    Observations

    The school’s evaluation process is detailed and well-organized. All of the participants believe it to be fair and, while opinions differ on how judgements of individual performance, the general consensus is that the system works

    From a teacher’s perspective, here’s how it works. First, several months before the evaluation, an administrator makes a series of short visits to my classroom. Each visit lasts somewhere between ten and thirty minutes and no notes are taken. In my case, only two visits occured and one was cut short when the administrator was called away to deal with an emergent issue.

    Following the visitation period, evaluation rubrics are distributed to faculty for self-evaluation. They are lengthy and measure a variety of skills, including preparation, classroom management, lesson-design, communication and so forth. Each rubric asks the teacher to score themselves on a four-point scale ona number of specific criteria and the modal average of each sheet is recorded at the bottom of the page.

    During the formal evaluation meeting, my principal asked me to walk him through the rubric and explain my scores on each criterion. He and I discussed any discrepencies between my score and his evaluation and the resulting scores were recorded onto a new evaluation which we both signed. My experience was that I was a harsher critic of myself than my principal, though he told me that, in most cases, the evaluation meeting took longer and he found himself disagreeing with teachers who thought more of their own abilities and performance than he did.

    In my own case, that concluded the process. We both signed the completed form and that was that. However, one of the sessions I observed was much more contentous.

    In this session, the principal, TB, felt that the teacher in question, AM, was too informal in his classroom, too “chummy” with his students. When TB presented his concern, AM got defensive and quite a bit of time was spent arguing about the merits of generating close relationships with students versus the dangers of not maintaining sufficient professional distance. This certainly bogged down the evaluation and was, I believe, an outgrowth of the process itself. While it is important for the teacher to feel that his insight into his own performance is valueable, it must remain clear at all times that the role of the administrator is to observe, evaluate and provide feedback.

    Reflections

    While I think that the evaluation process we use at my school is effective, it leaves much to be desired and can be improved in a number of significant ways.

    First, the process is too sudden. In my case, a single adminsitrator visited my classroom on only two occasions and spent a total of less than thirty minutes there. This is simply not enough time to get a sense of how I run my classroom. And, even worse, my research revealed that many teachers saw even less evaluation time due to the busy schedule of administators. Similarly, I was observed and evaluated by only one principal. Opening the process up to multiple observers would gererate more varied and dynamic feedback, as well as protect the integrity of the process and shield individuals from charges of unfair evaluation.

    Second, whle the existing process does provide feedback, it is entirely reactive in nature and, for the most part, occurs far too late in the school year to be of any use to the teachers. It is obvious that the process is designed to aid in the hire/no hire decision that must be made before contracts are offered each April for the coming school year. However, this is of little use to teachers; if they only find out in the spring that they’re doing sub-par teaching, there is no time to learn or improve their work. The process could be improved significanlty by inviting more experienced members of the faculty into the process. These “master teachers” could serve as first-round evaluators and coaches for teachers who need instruction or reminders as to best practices and methodologies.

    Conclusions

    As with many parts of my school’s systems, the teacher evaluation process feels good but not great. It was obviously designed to serve the needs of the administration rather than the faculty and room for improvement exists.

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