Instructional Leadership Week 2

My opinion will be concerning the Educator Prep and Development area. I believe it is a must that teachers know at least as much about technology and the developing ways as the students. I say as this because students spend much more time than educators due to the ever changing/made easier field of technology. In the not too distant past computers were only for the people with extra money, they were extremely large and cumbersome and were not user friendly at all. Today anything that can be done on a computer can also be done on a cell phone. This can be viewed as good or not so good. It is a huge boost in technology that almost any application one can think of is available in the palm of your hand. This is forcing younger students to learn how to use it, but are they taking full advantage of what is available to them? Are we as adults taking advantage of this? I say all of this because the first three statements are essentially to provide professional development in the area of Technology Applications for educators. EP01 states: Provide professional development for teaching and integrating Technology Applications into the foundation and enrichment TEKS through multiple delivery methods.  In some ways this is done but more for the benefit of the teacher than the student. EP02 states:  Provide professional development for Technology Applications courses as identified in Technology Applications Educator Standards VI - XI.  I don’t even think a teacher knows what this is let alone to be involved with professional development. And EP03 states: Provide training on the use of electronic tools and information to support sound, data-driven decision-making.  This is one area that we have been trained on ad nausea. There are only so many ways to skin a cat and we have been shown them all. With the emphasis on the tests and not the curriculum teachers are currently being overwhelmed by speaker after speaker telling us the same thing about retrieving information. I believe we can put 03 to rest. As for the rest of the Correlate ID’s, I agree that they are all important. However we must remember the time constraints of our teachers. Our district is behind the times as far as where we could/should be. I am not aware of too many districts that are on top of the technology curve like they may want, but then again budgetary constraints make it impossible to do so. The technology trend statewide and world wide will continue to grow, as the field is ever changing. Improving our district can only come with an increase in funds. However there are many other uses for the funds and may put technology on the back burner once again.

Week 5 ramblings and insights

The lectures and slides were helpful in the fact that they were a guideline or benchmark to use for the specific week. Professors gave their view and experience with each to give us a starting point. Their experience and knowledge from years of helping and doing were invaluable to us novices.

The readings held many good thoughts and insights to ideas that were never in the forefront of my mind. They offered many different and sometimes unique ways to look at, evaluate and even investigate a situation. There were many readings that did not offer any new insight but were just as important to revisit thoughts and ideas. At any rate this is the reason reading is good, to separate the currently useful from the less useful.

Searches are perhaps the easiest and quickest way to get your hands on a lot of information. The internet has brought information to our fingertips and it is that easy and quick to ascertain what you are looking for. The hard part is the next step, which is to disseminate information you need from that which you do not. It seems as though there cannot be any more research able to accomplish because everything that can be researched has already been researched. Wrong! How about this famous quote: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899

Although this has never been verified that Mr. Duell made this statement it is just as absurd. Searches have a wealth of information and so much more can be shared that it should be a never-ending process.

The assignments were, for the most part, helpful. It did seem that there were some that overlapped each other too closely to be called “working together” and others that were put in place just to make us work overtime. The rest though, were thought provoking and made me think outside the proverbial quadrilateral parallelogram. Sometimes as I was writing I was wondering why, and how this will ever be needed for me. But after finishing them the answer became clearer. You never know exactly when this information will be needed, but it will. Better to have the bullet in your belt than not to have it at all.

The discussion board was more like a warm up to begin the class. It was made to stimulate the brain into the thought process again, no matter how tired we were from a long and frustrating/rewarding day of dealing with our students. The more I wrote the more direction I found for other ideas for the lesson. Tiredness be darned.

At times the blogs seemed a redundancy to the discussion boards. It was the same writings to the same question or statement. It seemed as though it is put there just to make us take more time and pay our dues to “earn” our degree. I had the same type of work in another master’s program. However I do understand its significance due to the different professors we will encounter in the program. It is easier for them to read our blogs since they are on-going and the discussion boards are not.

Week 4 Action Research Plan

As a campus, the staff will be divided into committees to review and amend the existing Campus Improvement Plan.  These are our priorities:

Academic Priorities
Priority 1 - Improve the education design and delivery of instruction and curriculum by utilization of proven best practices

Priority 2 - Organize and optimize resources for improved academic results

Priority 3 - Analyze and measure teacher and principal effectiveness in improving student performance and results

Priority 4 - Develop, expand, and support a literacy-based initiative that goes beyond the walls of the school

Priority 5 - Create unique, innovative family- and community-friendly partnerships to improve academic results

The information below will list the activities on our campus that will directly support and enable our campus community to collectively plan, implement, and own OUR campus improvement plan.

Campus Intervention Team (C.I.T.): Our CIT meets at least 4 times a year to review EVERY student’s progress, current interventions, response to interventions, or need for more/less intense interventions as driven by formal and informal data.

Campus Committees:  Every teacher and staff member on our campus serves on a campus committee.  We will have seven committees; each committee is formulated to support each one of our campus 7 CIP goals.  These committees are the heart and soul of our CIP.  They will work together to write their portion of the CIP.  These committees meet once a month to review progress and fidelity of our campus implementation of our goals. 

Campus Leadership Team (C.L.T.): Our CLT is the driving force and facilitator of each of the committees.  This group serves as the committee leaders.  They meet with the principal set the agenda and review the goals for the upcoming committee meetings.

Grade level Team Leaders: Our grade level team leaders serve as the facilitator for our team level curriculum planning, review of grade level and school-wide data, as well as the conduit between the principal and team to disseminate information to and from the principal - specific to grade level decisions and planning. 

Curriculum / Discipline Meetings: All the academic team members will meet together to collaborate in writing lesson plans, review data trends, and to receive grade level and discipline specific training by our Teacher Leaders/Coaches

Team Meetings: Team meetings are held every other Tuesday.  These meetings are reserved to review campus information, announcements, and grade level business.  These are held in order to honor all curriculum time and ensure constant collaborating and continuity between the classes in each classroom, as well as throughout the school. 

Parent Committee: Our parent committee meets once per nine weeks to offer direct feedback pertaining to the functionality of the school, concerns, celebrations, and information that directly affects our community members. 

Faculty Meetings: We have a faculty meeting once per month.  These faculty meetings are reserved for school-wide team building and direct faculty and staff professional development.  All school business information is disseminated through team meetings and Team Leader meetings.

Vertical Team Meetings:  Vertical team meetings are interwoven into our committee meetings as well as the academic team meetings.  These groups directly discuss grade level and school-wide data trends, concerns, celebrations and their direct implications to the instruction and curriculum implementation. 

State of Tippit Meeting :  A school-wide meeting to allow each committee to share with the school our progress toward each goal and actions pertaining to those goals.  Staff members are then encouraged to share their direct feedback and recommendations for each of the CIP goals. 

Classroom Survey Meetings with Admin: Each teacher meets with campus administration to review and go over current data.  This is an opportunity for the teacher(s) and administration to celebrate together, as well as collaboratively identify gaps, concerns, and areas of focus.  Teachers are expected to know their data and the direct implications of their classroom data. 

Peer Observations: Each teacher does two peer observations per school year.  This works to create a true understanding of what their peers are doing.  It also encourages collaboration.  It ties accountability to district and campus-adopted instructional strategies.  The first Peer Observation is a teacher in their own grade level.  The second is of a peer either in the grade above or below them.  Our sixth grade teachers do a peer observation of the fifth grade teachers at Williams/Mitchell/Pickett and they observe Tippit teachers.

Parent Collaboration and Notification: We work hard to educate our parents on what is expected of each student at Tippit, as well as offer our parents trainings to empower our parents to support their children through their educational journey.  We strive to create a partnership between the parents and the school.  We celebrate often.  We notify immediately of any concerns. 

Campus and Grade-level Book Studies: Directly aligns to professional development that correlates with campus data. 

Tippit/Mitchell/Picket/Williams collaboration meetings:  Campus administration, teachers, and specialists from both campuses meet numerous times throughout the year to review data, to discuss curriculum and instructional implementation, celebrations and areas of focus. 

ELL Team Meetings:  ELL teachers and paras meet at least once a month for bilingual specific training and planning.

      What Resources and research tools needed for data gathering?

Campus Data, Eduphoria, benchmarks, checkpoints, EOC data, SAIL meetings, 504 data, Sp.Ed. data, teachers, parent and staff surveys, etc.

    Is there a timeline for completion or implementation of activities?

 We follow the district time line for our activities that support our CIP.  See the above for more specific information.

       How will I/we monitor the implementation of the new CIP?

 See the above for more specific information

   What will we use to evaluate the effectiveness of the new CIP?

 student data, attendance data, discipline data, surveys, meeting notes, agendas, and our existing CIP and CLT meeting structures.

Action Research Plan: Campus Improvement Plan

ACTION PLANNING INFORMATION

GOAL: To analyze the existing CIP and determine its functionality vs. the success of the school.

The person(s) responsible for implementation of the action plan are my principal and myself.

Activities designed to achieve the objectives would be meeting with the principal to review plus/deltas, team meetings, campus meetings as well as one on one meetings.

Resources and research tools needed for data gathering are teachers, students, administrators, stakeholders as well as our central office personnel.

Our CIP is an ongoing, liquid document. However, we are looking to complete it before the end of this school year. This is also a movable timeline but not by much.

The process for monitoring the achievement of goals and objectives lies on our principal’s shoulders as well as mine and another intern. He will monitor our work closely as we will be working very closely with him to insure its success.

Assessment instrument(s) to evaluate the effectiveness of the action research study will be our ability to implement change where it’s needed, leave what is effective, and final approval of our school administration as well as our central office.

Week 2

Without a doubt I have realized that the people we have listened to, as well as read about live and die by action research. This is not a bad thing, it drives many of the decisions. Much good quantitative information comes from their action research and many good decisions are thus made. This also leads to good follow up research and more good, quality decisions. it's also interesting to see how the administrators pick their people to talk with, research with or drive them in the proper direction. Obviously not everyone should be picked to be  involved in research  as not everyone is interested in making the workplace better for the students as well as the teachers and administration.

Action Research

Action research is a process of reflecting on problems, led by individuals working with others in teams to address issues and solve problems. Action research is done simply with action. As a result one is more involved with the research, problems and solutions for the research project. Foregoing the traditional research without being involved, or never having been in the position of what is being researched will give one the ability to be in greater control of their desired outcome. This is a useful tool for someone that has a very strong opinion or is just in a position of wanting to make a change for the better. (ie) All teachers should want their students to become better educated in life as well as in the classroom. everyone wants scores to improve. The teacher could view a combination of previous scores, practice tests and homework, individual as well as group work and talking with the student to see what motivational techniques would be helpful. Collaboration with previous teachers of the student(s) along with the present lessons from these teachers can also give an indication of what is working and what is not. Action research is a never ending, never stopping way of constantly stsaying on top of your goal for the betterment of the idea, the team and ourselves.

Educational leaders can use action research in many ways. One way would be the use of personal journals. These would be for their own ideas as well as any observations made. Journaling the ideas is a great way to keep them in front of you and not forget. Action research can also be used as a data collection tool for improvement. This can be for the student as well as a teacher or administrative team member. It can also be used as a sharing forum for planning and implementing new ideas for improvement.