Student success is relative to time and place and is ultimately defined by each individual student's goals and personal situation. While there are both quantitative and qualitative measures in which to measure student success, society often fluctuates back and forth between the two depending on the political climate and sometimes academic research, there is no single comprehensive method that can offer a complete and meaningful picture of the many ways students can attain success. Despite the constant struggle to track and define student growth and progress, we have an obligation to our students and to society at large to continue to develop and establish meaningful student success indicators and measurements that can more authentically communicate students' successes.
Trust. Communication. Mindfulness. These are three of the most important factors in establishing long term relationships with colleagues. Relationship building is about being a positive factor in someone else’s life by helping them along the way, adding value to that person’s life, filling their bucket so to speak. In so doing, it is necessary to build trust. Trust is the foundation of every good relationship. By opening up and being honest with your colleagues and encouraging honesty among your colleagues, it allows for a more positive work environment and thus helps the school to run more efficiently and the shareholders to communicate more effectively. The better and more effectively you are able to communicate with those around you, the richer the relationships will be. Therefore it is necessary to establish a positive and consistent platform for communication with all shareholders. With the need for constant communication, it is necessary to be mindful of everyone's differences, challenges, and daily lives. It is important to learn about your colleagues, but it is also important to understand their varying styles of communication in order to resolve conflicts amicably in order to model and maintain a positive learning environment.
I have been approached for advice on a wide variety of problems, whether it is discrete advice regarding a personal decision, providing guidance for approaching unfamiliar or complicated situations, assisting in improving self-awareness and/or self-management strategies, or mentoring by providing guidance to assist in teaching, or other career opportunities. I enjoy the opportunity to help others solve problems in part because of the many people along the way who have freely offered me guidance and support whenever I needed it. Additionally, I learn a great deal in helping others solve problems because it provides an opportunity for me to listen, investigate, and think critically to not necessarily provide the "right" answers for the advisee, but rather to walk them through the process of coming to his or her own resolution. This is a skill that is often overlooked and taken for granted, but problem solving and the ability to help others work through their problems is absolutely vital for creating a positive learning environment in addition to developing good citizenry.
Leadership Dispositions
Appreciate the collective intelligence of the team
Believe in the power of diversity among team members.
View team leadership as a role by which to serve, not as a position to be served
View power as something to be released and shared rather than something to hold and control
Understand that teams are for achieving a team purpose.
Set an Example: Whatever the leader does, says or how s/he behaves is ultimately how the rest of the team will follow suit. As such, a leader sets the tone by establishing the consistencies, motivating and supporting team members, etc. to create an effective team.
Conflict Resolution: Leaders must be able to handle workplace conflict well. Among a diverse team, whether of age, geography or cultural background, conflict is bound to occur. People need a set of ground rules, a common, consistent set of guidelines that help them understand the expected consistencies amongst all the differences they experience, and to help deal with confrontation and conflict.
Common Purpose: Essentially provides the reason for collaboration. It is essential to ensure that all members have had an opportunity to align to a common purpose before moving forward to the implementation phase new initiatives.
Clear Roles: Every team member is clear about his or her role as well as the role of every other team member to ensure proper development and division of clear roles to exact maximum efficiency and cooperation. Role clarity is easily achieved through discussion and therefore, a leader must provide plenty of opportunities to facilitate discussion.
Effective Processes: Identify, map, and master key team processes; for every process, each team member has a clear, specific role based on function, skills, and expertise. Constantly evaluate the effectiveness of key processes by asking- How are we doing? What are we learning? How can we do it better?
Relationship Building: Solid team relationships provide the climate needed for high achieving levels of collaboration and are characterized by trust, acceptance, respect, understanding, and courtesy. It is the core of any successful classroom, or any successful work environment. It is important to invest in both students and teachers by taking an interest in what is important and meaningful in their lives. Once you, as a teacher or a leader demonstrate this, you may begin to build a community of trust and acceptance which is crucial to leading a diverse team; therefore, encouraging the diverse group to look at the world through different lenses and thus be able to address problems, decisions, and other issues with collective, creative solutions.
Excellent Communication: Communication is the very means of cooperation allowing organizations to be more responsive and move faster. Fast, clear, timely, accurate communication is a hallmark of high levels of team performance. The team understands that effective communication is essential, and as a result, they approach communication with a determined intentionality. They talk about it a lot and put effort into keeping excellent team communication. for a team cannot maintain unity of purpose without exceptionally good communication among team members. Team members appreciate openness and sincerity but it seems that most leaders don’t communicate the rationale for their decisions. Sharing thoughts, feelings and rationale will help unify people from different backgrounds. Being upfront about the situation and involving people as much as possible in decision making engenders a sense of inclusion and will ensure everyone feels part of the same team. If they are not part of the process, the team won’t develop the understanding of the business they need to be effective.
Open-Door Policy: Helping people to be more comfortable with ambiguity is essential, especially for the collaborative process. Different people communicate in different ways and therefore like to raise issues in different ways, which may not always be at a faculty meeting in an open forum. As such, a leader must understand the important concerns and be willing to remove the barriers. Therefore, leaders need to be seen listening to, and acting on, the concerns of diverse team members .
My level of competency and comfortability in regards to technology is far superior than most. I have always been ahead of the curve on the technology front and utilized many technologies in my classroom before being deployed across my current school district. For example, we began our 1:1 Chromebook initiative in Fall of 2016, but many of the resources such as Google Classroom (and other Google Apps for education) I had already started using in my classroom two years prior by allowing my students to use their smartphones, or bring their own device. As I was also very tech savvy, I was given additional desk top computers in my classroom for student use. During the past year I have assisted in the revamp of my school’s senior project and online portfolio, which is a graduation requirement, as it was expanded from senior year only and spread to over four years to better incorporate all facets of college and career readiness. It took an immense amount of work and preparation in producing guidelines, rubrics and a website with tips to make it easy for the students to follow. As evidenced on my resume, you will see listed many of my technology presentations.
As a teacher in a constantly changing society, it is important to be open and ready to embrace change, but there are three areas of best practice that remain constant: establishing high expectations, knowledge of the content, and creating a culture for learning.
Establishing high expectations, as well as the roles of both student and teacher is vital to a successful classroom. The classroom should be student-centered, and students should always be encouraged to work at their best level. Thus, the teacher should act as a guide for students to access the outside world and aid student learning in manipulating newly acquired knowledge.
Although knowledge of the content seems obvious, it is often overlooked. Great teachers have a thorough understanding of the curriculum and ensure his or her teaching meets the standards. More so, great teachers have an incredible knowledge of and an exceptional enthusiasm for the content they are teaching. Teachers with a wealth of knowledge in his or her content area are always prepared to answer questions in multiple fashions and are capable of keeping the material interesting for the students.
The classroom should provide an environment that is comfortable, composed, and conducive to learning and developing self-sufficient and independent learners with plenty of opportunities for critical thinking and problem solving. Therefore, the classroom should encourage relationship building opportunities amongst the teacher and student, student to student, and both teacher and student to the community at large. A teacher must ensure all students receive an education that is fair and consistent. However, it is also important to adapt the classroom based on student needs by assessing students’ abilities and continuously monitor their progress. Therefore, transparency and communication of student progress to both student and parent is crucial.
All students, both college bound, and non-college bound, should be prepared with the skills to deal with the many demands that arise in real life situations. By educating students for the expectations of the real world, students will be better able to apply his or her knowledge and to adapt it to better suit his or her needs thereby instilling the desire to become a lifelong learner.
I would address a wide range of skills and abilities in my classroom by differentiating instruction by various methods depending on the circumstances:
First and foremost, you have to build rapport with your students. If Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are not being tended to first, then there will be no desire to learn.
I would integrate different types of strategies to address multimodal intelligences such as hands on activities, visual note-taking, as well as group work and independent work. It’s imperative to offer student choice so that the student may learn via the modality best suited for him or her.
Modify assignments based on student’s skill levels. For example, use resources such as www.commonlit.org to help individualize student learning, or reduce the number of multiple choice answer options for easily overwhelmed students.
Develop and design high interest lessons and/or activities by gathering information on student interests. If students are interested in a topic, they are more likely to want to learn more, thus, increasing engagement.
Mastery Learning. This allows students the opportunity to practice, make mistakes, correct those mistakes, and learn at a pace more suited to their own abilities, so that he or she will come to understand the content.
Investment. Investment in the business world means to purchase an item of value in hopes of making an even more favorable return whether that return is money or simply better business. However odd a quality this may be, I find it extremely valuable amongst the few principals I have worked for who have not only invested their time, but who have also reached into their pocket whenever the need arose. There are two principals that come to mind who made an investment not only in the students of the school, but the faculty as well. Although they are two extremely different people, the one thing they have in common is their investment of the future. This quality helped create a positive work environment and encouraged teachers to do their best and to also begin in investing in students in hopes to receive greater success. It sounds like a crazy gimmick from a self-help book, but it really works. In all my years in teaching high school, I have never seen teachers and students work so hard for a return on an investment as I did during the tenure of these two wonderful principals.
A few years ago, by the recommendation of one of my assistant principals, I picked up a copy of How Full Is Your Bucket? By Tom Rath and Donald O. Clifton, PhD. The authors have a very good message about productivity in the workplace and its correlation to positive reinforcement. The premise of the book came about when the author (Clifton) was studying psychology and realized the field was based on finding out what was wrong with people. As such, he began the quest for finding out what was right with people. The book offers much data, both statistical and experiential, on the impact of positivity. It also has many strategies and approaches to becoming more positive in the workplace and in life in general. It takes a very realistic approach rather than coming off as a droning of statistical analysis or worse a cheesy feel good book. The message makes sense; a positive leader will employ positive workers (respective to both teachers and students) thus creating a positive work environment (the goal behind PLC’s, Professional Learning Communities). A positive environment fosters educational excellence regardless of if you are a teacher filling a students’ bucket or an administrator filling a teachers bucket. However, the book also mentions that there is such a thing as too much positivity that can lead to decreased productivity. In essence you cannot be so overly positive that you neglect the negative. This is a great book for teachers and administrators alike.
(2018) Education, fundamentally and systematically is still the same, but society has changed and that in part is one of the greatest challenges of education today. There are always a number of challenges that could be attributed to a decrease in student success, or lack thereof, but all in all what it boils down to is that the "business" of education can't keep up with the demands of its clientele, or its competition. Systemic changes need to happen in order to ensure success for every student. This will require a lot of grit and a lot of innovative thinking and a lot of collaboration. As a teacher in the classroom, I do not have the capacity to make grand changes, but I can make waves. Recently, I attended a Project Based Learning workshop with Magnify Learning, which I believe should be a requirement for all teachers to attend as it is phenomenal and you walk away with a product ready to use in your classroom. However, at this workshop I developed a project that would require students to develop a proposal for a new model of high school that would be better suited to meet the needs of today's learners. It is still a work in progress, but it is very relevant to students and has the potential to generate ideas and perspectives that could change the foundation of education as we know it. If you would like to preview the project in progress, you may do so here.
(2012) The most important challenge in education today relative to student success would have to be teacher accountability. Not to say that there is too much or too little accountability, but rather that the system used to hold teachers accountable is flawed. In years past the accountability scale has tilted more towards one side or the other, being student or teacher. However, for the educational system to truly thrive there has to be a balance of accountability that of which we have yet to attain. This of course impacts students because they are either being asked to do too little or too much. At present though there are many issues with teacher performance, which lead to the development of an excessive amount of paperwork and documentation. If teachers are expected to hold their students to such high standards, then teachers should be held to those same standards sans the loopholes. I hold myself to high standards as well as my students. I do not ask of my students anything that I could not ask of myself while at the same time I push my students to do better just as I push myself. I also try to keep updated on many of the discussions and forums regarding teacher accountability (as well as student). I have often written states people, the education commissioner, and even the Courier Journal prompting readers to consider a change in accountability assessments for both students and teachers.
Learner. Manager. Advocate. These are three of the most important roles in any given school. Learner is important because a good leader is dedicated to life long learning. Learning does not stop at the classroom door and it is essential that a leader embody this idea. I see myself as a life-long learner simply because I love to learn and acquire new knowledge. I learn by reading and by talking and by doing, but mostly by teaching. My students have taught me more than I could ever write on pages. Manager is essential to a good leader because they need to be able to delegate responsibility and maintain good organization. It is unthinkable that you could run a sufficient business single-handedly. At some point you have to learn to use whatever resources available to you and to also use them efficiently and according to their capability. For example, I was the Junior Class Sponsor for five years and unlike most counties, the Junior Class Sponsor at Bullitt East is responsible for coordinating prom for both Juniors and Seniors. From the very start, I utilized every student according to their ability and for those five years our school had exceptional and exquisite proms. Which as an adult that may not seem like a big to-do, but memory making for students requires a lot of attention to detail, a great amount of delegation, and a lot of organization. In addition, when I gave up the reigns of Junior Class Sponsor, my efficient management of the system was so strategically designed that my predecessors simply continued using the same system without the need to make any changes. Advocate; although last, is certainly not the least. A great leader is a great advocate; not just for the students, but also for the teachers and faculty. A teacher once told my nephew that you have to be an advocate for yourself because at some point you will find that there is nobody to do it for you. I agreed with this woman and have since made sure that I am not only advocating on behalf of my students, but also encouraging them to become advocates for themselves. I don’t want them to just stand up for beliefs, but to truly understand what they believe in and why and most importantly that they are capable of standing on his or her own two feet. I believe that a good teacher and a good leader go beyond advocating for others by also teaching others to advocate for themselves.