The Balance Beam

Today I provided sub coverage to Ms. Bustillos the ELA-S kindergarten teacher so she could do some planning with the facilitator. What a day!!! WE worked on an Avenues lesson around signs. The students were well behaved and helpful. I really enjoyed getting back into the classroom and I know that the time was productive and appreciated. While I do not intend to be a “sub” regularly at Beach Court I believe that my willingness to thoughtfully be a team player will help develop trust and openness with staff as long as I do not allow it to be abused.

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)

Today’s time was spent primarily on an intense but highly productive planning meeting. Audrey, Suzanne, Amy, Dana, Frank and I engaged in an amazing conversation around planning the rollout and implementation of a Tier 2 structure for ELA-E students at BC. Amy’s expertise and inquiry approach was instrumental to developing a plan that included strategic and thoughtful decision-making around student needs, teacher concerns, implementation obstacles and resources both human and capital. As a first step some diagnostic testing and targeting of the ¾ classroom were agreed upon. Upcoming responsibilities for me include supporting and attending the planned PD. Additionally, I will be generating a spreadsheet to collect and analyze student data in the targeted classroom. I will attach the preliminary version I created but it is likely I will be adjusting this worksheet in the future.

bc_tier2_data

Today we spent time sharing the graphic organizers that were introduced in the last session. I did not complete mine but was fortunate enough to see some great examples being shared.

The class displayed several interesting and useful versions of the organizers. I am hopeful that I can use some in the future to help create some depth and organization to my OD. I will try to attach the blank graphic organizers to this post.

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 focused on continuing our discussion of the budget and introduced us to the multiple measures organizer. We have been working hard on collecting our budget information to generate a meaningful and accurate budget for our school. Additionally, we are planning how we will use the multiple measure article and organizer to accurately portray our school data. This is going to be quite challenging and I am trying to conceptualize how I might collect and visually represent the data in a meaningful way.

During this session we reviewed the various graphic organizers that we could use to manage our data. This data will be the foundation of the work we do on the organizational diagnosis. As I worked with each of the tools I found myself drawn back to my experience with the data coding process I used to complete my action research project. It seemed to connect and extend many of the features of the tools we were using. It is my hope that I can extend my work with data coding and incorporate elements of the other organizers to deepen the work that I do on the OD. The ability to connect the graphic organizers to past practice will allow me to contextualize the idea of collecting and analyzing qualitative data more effectively into the work I do. This process was facilitated by the thoughtful work of my teachers and colleagues. We consistently work to find commonality in what we do with what we will do/should do. I am hoping that I will open myself up to using some aspects of the other tools and that I will not rely on the tool that I am most familiar with. I also think I will need to generate a more visual representation of the data I collected.

This session introduced the concepts and underlying framework that supports system thinking. As leaders we are expected to work on the system with the idea of making it work more effectively for those we serve. System thinking is challenging and complex but we can do it if we are thoughtful and reflective about how we operate. I think that my role as an instructional specialist has allowed me to become much more acutely aware of the complexities and challenges of working in a systems orientation. My role places me in a change agent position in multiple systems at all levels of the hierarchy. This can often cause frustration as my influence and control ebb and flow within each of these contexts. I must maintain constant vigilance to be prepared to leverage opportunities to impact and lubricate change. The introduction and use of the systems tools during this session was extremely supportive in developing and extending my mental model around system thinking. I enjoyed “running up” the ladder of inference in our example to the group as a way to demonstrate one of the “tools”.

Finally, I must also try to reconcile the reality that although we are moving forward, DPS is still struggling to adopt a true learning organizational model as a focus of their system model.