FELLOWSHIP OF INSTRUCTIONAL LEADERS – DEC MEETING

 

This Saturday our Instructional Leadership Team met for another MiFil conference in Lansing.  The goal this year has been to build a self-sustaining, more collaborative and accountable professional learning community in our school.  The morning started by looking at our observations about instructional strategies being implemented in our school and summarizing our key learning.  We then created a poster that showed our implementation challenge, lessons learned, and our next steps.  All schools displayed their posters and everyone did a “gallery walk” and placed warm and cool comments on the posters via post-it notes.  This was done to push learning and give greater clarity to the school teams.  It was great to see what other schools were doing and some of their challenges as well as give specific feedback to a large number of schools at once.  I noticed many of the same challenges – varying levels of implementation by teachers in their building and how to get total staff  “buy in”.  There was also a need to find ways to support, give feedback, and determine a strategy’s effectiveness.  As a team, we discussed the feedback given by other schools and had some great conversations about what needs to be done as we move forward.

Another task of the day was thinking about “Who are we trying to lead?” by looking at developmental stages of improving schools and generating a set of prototypes representing various groups of people in our school that we are attempting to lead.  This was an interesting activity as we looked at the various groups of teachers we worked with, how to reach them all, and asking ourselves, “Where are we now in our development, and what impact might the decisions we make have on our ability to develop ourselves?”  The goal is to reach stage 5 where there is internal accountability and sustained growth where “all teachers agree to and frequently enact a common understanding of powerful teaching practices and learn together so that this understanding is adaptive, conscious, and expanding”.

A third main reflection of the day was looking at how to provide support for teachers as we continue to move forward and to design a process so everyone can be involved in implementation as well as find ways to overcome resistance in our building.  This is part of the fifth step toward becoming exemplary:  administrators and teacher leaders skillfully and relentlessly implement improvement efforts, monitor quality, and provide appropriate supports.  We discussed how we could better monitor and assess strategy implementation efforts in our school and realized the greater need to use our existing PLC time as one for reflecting on practices and having more structured examination of student work.  Feedback from our DL Coaches, ILT, and colleagues also needs to be utilized more often as well as follow through on strategies demonstrated to staff.  We also saw a need to look at the number of initiatives we have and use data to support the effectiveness of each to determine which have the greatest impact on student achievement at our school.

It was another great Saturday of work and time to really delve into our challenges and next steps as we work toward the goal of being self-sustaining!

Our next meeting is in January, and unfortunately it will be the first one I miss in 4 years – but I will be in Arizona for the National Teachers of the Year first meeting 🙂

 

 

 

 

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Bee December 1, 2012 Blog