I just returned home from a week at MiFil (Michigan Fellowship for Instructional Leaders) in Lansing.  It was a time for Instructional Leadership Teams from high priority schools across Michigan to get together and focus our work to improve student achievement.  I have been part of this group for 3 years now and have learned so much from it, especially as it pertains to expanding my instructional leadership.  This summer’s topics included “Building the Textual Lineages of African-American Adolescent Males”, focusing on equity, adopting building-wide reading strategies, increasing student engagement, and cultivating efficacy. We also had a chance to see Brockton High School from Massachusetts.  They turned around their school from being one of the lowest achieving in their state, to now one of the highest.  It shows that anything is possible when you have motivated people, the proper tools, and support in place.  What a great story!

During this week, our team from Ottawa worked hard focusing our priorities for school improvement, especially as it related to improving reading comprehension, an area that our students are really struggling with.  We also had a chance to talk with other schools and see the work they have done.  What a wonderful place to share ideas, celebrate successes and talk about challenges we faced throughout the year!

The Fellowship invited several schools to share some successful ideas they have implemented at their schools in a presentation.  Our school was selected to present on an Instructional Template we developed last year for teachers to use in their planning.  It was exciting to be able to share this tool with other schools and hopefully it will help their teachers as well.  We received great response and I look forward to hearing how the template works in their schools.

I also saw some great presentations by other schools.  You can really see how hard these educators work to try to improve student achievement.  Their stories are inspiring! It actually gave me an idea to add a page on my website that will be dedicated to “Success Stories”.  My hope is that schools can share what they are doing that works and others can use these ideas to help their schools improve.  I also want to be able to highlight schools at the State Board meetings to let others know what good things are happening in our schools.

I was also invited to give a presentation as Michigan Teacher of the Year while at this conference.  The response I received after I finished was so overwhelming, I cannot begin to put it in words.  It was a moment that I will always remember!  All the educators there work in high-poverty schools and we all share challenges, but we all are there to keep moving forward and make a difference in the lives of these children.  I am proud to be among this group.  It is amazing to know all the work that we do, and as I stated in my speech, I could not be more excited to represent our schools!

It was an awesome week and the information we learned will be brought back to our staff as we begin to plan for the next school year.  One thing for sure – there are a lot of educators who work hard year round, including summers!

The Michigan Fellowship of Instructional Leaders is designed to support instructional leaders as they develop the skills necessary to systematically improve the quality of instruction in their buildings by exercising visionary, instructional and operational/systems leadership, and cross-cutting leadership skills related to data collection and analysis, communication and managing change.