The Balance Beam

Today we worked on reviewing legal cases to share with the class. They were intriguing as vignettes into situations we will eventually have to face in our roles as principals. It was valuable to hear not only the views of the legal minds but also of my colleagues who have experienced many similar episodes in their teaching experiences. In addition, we began some earnest work on the principal standards. We are generating a GOOGLE doc that I will try to attach to this post. The goal is to collect and share our interpretations about how/what/why these standards impact our future daily practice.

Here is a link to the doc: Spreadsheet (You will need a Google account to sign in)

This week’s intern time coincided with the Network 5 classroom walkthrough experience. I was able to engage with my work team and the BC team in observing classroom instruction. As a leadership experience it was invaluable to have a “foot in both camps” so to speak. The results of the walkthrough supported both my work and administrative experience.

The evidence captured indicated that core instruction is strong at BC. Additionally, we noticed that students and teachers are meaningfully engaged in instruction with a focus on intended learning. The gap that was discussed was the absence of a strategic TIER 2 to support students who are struggling with core.

The ongoing action step for me will be to follow up with Dana, Suzanne and Audrey about addressing this issue.

I am including the feedback sheet that was generated by the walkthrough to this email.

classroom_walk-through_feedback_beech-court

I am really beginning to engage in meaningful collaborative work with staff at BC. I am scheduled to meet with Dana, mild/mod, to plan work in fourth grade around interventions at the Tier 2 level. Additionally, I joined Audrey and Amanda to review SIT referrals for some of Amanda’s students. We brainstormed some intervention strategies and planned to review and extend what was already being done. I will also be sitting in on one of the SIT students parent-teacher conferences to provide “administrative” support and consultation around intervention planning that includes behavioral expectations for home.

This work has positioned me to be an ongoing resource at BC for RtI and SIT consultation and collaboration. This has occurred through thoughtful and consistent support and inquiry around how I can best provide meaningful leadership at BC. As we move on I will continue to be consistent and follow through on agreed upon support.

Over the next few weeks I hope that my work will grow and develop through meetings and conversations with Dana, Audrey and Frank.

This week our conversation focused around our use of CBAM as a tool to identify leverage points and areas of need for our schools. I have worked with this protocol in the past and it is certainly a useful tool. My goal is to generate my CBAM as a SurveyMonkey survey and analyze the results to increase productivity for our work around RtI and SIT. The question was simple but will still help with planning. I will include the survey and the data below.

My entry for this post is intended to synthesize my work at Beach Court as the administrative intern up to today. I will be posting weekly reflections for each week from here on out but wanted to “capture” my reflection of the work up to this point. My experiences thus far have focused primarily on listening and observing. I have spent most days “shadowing” Frank as he goes about his daily activities. This time has allowed me to get comfortable with the culture and staff at BC. I have been able to engage with Frank in several conversations about values, beliefs and assumptions as well as the more mundane realities of being a principal. Another advantage of the “anthropological approach to my first weeks at BC has allowed me to collect a lot of great anecdotal data about the socio-cultural elements at play with the staff, parents and students.

The biggest benefit to my “slow” start is that I feel as though I am an accepted and respected member of the school culture because I was able to listen and observe respectfully. I asked probing questions that demonstrated my intention to be a “support” and resource to the staff. Now, I expect that my action and leadership plan is much more likely to be a collaborative effort. The BC staff is pretty amazing in their dedication and commitment to student achievement and I am hopeful that my efforts can connect to these values.

The success in building my place in the school community came from my willingness to learn and be patient and from careful release of responsibility from Frank. He was instrumental in gradually developing my role in the building from functional to consultative to collaborative.

The ongoing efforts will need to be coordinated carefully with my data and OD. However, the trend and arising need at the building is turning out to be RtI implementation focused on teacher understanding and integration.

Tonight we worked with Charles Elbot, the Director of the Office of Intentional School Culture. He shared with us a 4 mindset model of how schools exist in a cultural context. The 4 include:

• Dependent
• Independent
• Interdependent
• Integrated-capitalization of all 3 preceding models

These models are situation-based and attuned to the context. In an integrated approach they are used appropriately as the circumstance is needed and the leadership recognizes the need to be fluid in the application of varying models of school culture. It is important to note how culture is a powerful predictor of school success.

Charles’ suggestion of the faculty sending two postcards a week to students was a GREWAT idea and a simple impactful step to improving school culture.

Charles really helped me think about leadership as a series of “waterfalls” that we must surmount to continue our journey upstream. As we succeed we generate and reflect on new learning, when we swim upstream we learn, when we float downstream we are allowing external influence to create our future. The 4 models also help set context for leadership action. How will I capitalize on these ideas as I grow as a leader?

We also began work with some amazing graphic organizers and I see them having some distinct and leveragable use with school for the SIP work. I will post more on these tools soon.

This session allowed us to present our budget to the group and get feedback from the teams. We also reviewed the SPF documents with Bob Good from AR. His explanations made the value and usefulness of the SPF even clearer. The SPF is clearly a tool that has the potential to yield a lot of useful data and ideas for change and decisions. The continued conversation about the Ritchie interns is also exciting. I am looking forward to seeing who receives the internships.

This session was a fantastic opportunity to look at the Ritchie program through a different lens. The time we spent with the Adams 12 cohort was invaluable. They are an intelligent, passionate and engaging group. I expect that we all learned a lot during our time together. I look forward to seeing them again in the spring. Additionally, our conversation about the state of Organizational Diagnosis was very useful. I am hopeful that I can move further ahead with this project in the near future. The speaker was exceptional in giving us meaningful and useful advice on how to improve our interviewing skills. I also gained so much from the feedback about how I did during the mock interview. Overall this experience was fantastic.

The work of session 10 connects very much to the blog I am using to record the work of the program. We discussed the value and use of reflective journaling. I have been “blogging” for quite awhile now as a component of practice and reflection for quite some time now for grad school, Network 5, and to some degree for the math and science leadership groups. I have changed the “reflective questions” I had been using in the past to the ones that were shared at this session. Over the coming weeks I hope to grow my skills at using these questions to generate some clarity out of the confusion of new learning. The process of reflective journaling is one that I feel that we woefully underutilize in our schools and district in general. I made this case strongly in my grad program and my work with Network 5 but resistance is strong due to the seeming need to take “extra” time to do it. However, once the process is developed, streamlined and effectively managed it can serve to greatly increase the productivity of a learning organization.

This session had us thinking about the concept of navigating permanent “white water”. The pricipalship is most certainly like white water in its challenges and risks. The use of the CBAM as a tool to gauge the change in your school will be an amazing diagnostic and progress monitoring tool. The ability to be open and honest with your team to indicate concisely how they can conceptualize movement in the organization will help make our schools more productive. The factors matrix included with the CBAM conversation is one of the best graphic organizers around for leaders. It is a quick but precise process for evaluating some common pitfalls that impede meaningful change. The use of this matrix along with the other strategies and tools we have learned we should be able to generate positive growth in our organizations.