The Balance Beam

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.

Today I had an opportunity to participate with Beach Court in a data team meeting. They were looking at a writing sample and scoring them in grade level teams. The teams did very well looking at work and discussing the strengths and obstacles they saw. The goal was to generate SMART goals around what they found to work on in the upcoming weeks. In the early stages of conversation the staff discussed many strategies that they could work on. The group worked well together and I was able to provide some support around maintaining the fidelity of the SMART goal process. Audrey and Frank were quite receptive and I continue to see opportunity to focus my leadership action in the direction of data/RtI/ SIT. If I am able to create a more solid understanding of how these ideas play off each other. The Beach Court team would benefit from seeing the integrated elements of these concepts.

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.

Today’s work at Beach Court began with a conversation about how RtI is a meaningful and thoughtful shift in thinking about how we serve all students. The school gym teacher and I conversed about how the new model could help “capture” struggling students sooner. Her concern was centered on the appearance that we wait too long to act on student need using an intervention approach. This has been a theme that I have picked up on in both my research and in conversation with staff. I am beginning to see a potential focus for my leadership action. Frank and I also talked about the role of behavior in the RtI framework.

I was flattered this morning when Frank announced congratulations for Dominique and I on the birth of Julia to the staff. Many teachers and students wished me well. J

The morning continued with a meeting with a parent concerned about a student with lice. This fear was confirmed a short time later when Frank and I, along with the school secretary checked the student’s hair.

I sat in on the third grade class as they interviewed Mr. Roti for their feature articles. He was engaging and funny.

Afterwards, I was able to sit in on two SGO planning meetings. Both teachers had written really good objectives and were open to feedback and support for adjusting them slightly. In both cases, I was helpful in reframing the idea of pre/post testing to a more standards-based approach and the collection of a BOE to demonstrate students have met standards. Frank was supportive and provided me with positive feedback about his learning and how the ideas will support teachers. Additionally, I planned to meet with the teachers afterwards and continue to support them as they planned to implement the strategies.

I noticed today that there was open dialogue around objectives and what it will take to succeed. I also became aware and the speed at which “crises” comes at the principal. If I logged them correctly Frank had to solve at least 23 “problems” this morning. WOW! I also am getting a sense that RtI and the SIT process will need some additional support here.

My awareness of the multi-faceted elements of the leadership role is becoming more acute as I begin to examine and reflect more thoughtfully. I am seeing so many subtle ways in which the development that Frank has done around a strong collaborative team impacts students and staff.

In the future, I should try to record and reflect on the time I spend at the school more quickly. I feel like I should keep the ideas fresh in my head rather than taking so much time to kind of “mull them over”.

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.

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.