Northern Tier Leadership Professional Development

For the past two years, I have been involved in a leadership course designed for the Zone 1 administrators. On May 2, we had our last workshop of year 2 and we were asked to reflect on what we learned. It's difficult to wrap it all up with string and present it, but here goes.
In Year 1, I learned that I needed to show my staff, students and community what my vision is for the school and keep it front and center when making decisions and entertaining change. I spent most of year 1 continuing to build relationships and facilitate culture change for the better. The staff were beginning to trust me and believe me when I said I would do something. That's because I did it. There were a few issues I had to deal with, but because the staff could see the benefits of change, and because I kept them in the loop, they came along with me. By working on the vision together, and designing it to suit our students and community, we were able to make it happen. Through the use of a connections tool that I appropriated from another leadership course, we were able to see the individual contribution to the vision and the growth in each other as an instructional team. Individual encouragement and acknowledgement made people feel valued and inspired them to take risks and talk about their accomplishments. We had people talking about their lessons in the staff room and willingly staying after school to discuss a strategy!

Kouzes and Pozner's The Leadership Challenge had me modelling the way, encouraging the heart, and challenging the process. I don't expect staff to do something I'm not willing to do myself. For example, my supervision schedule is just as heavy as any teacher on staff. I take part in the professional development that the staff do and I teach half time, sometimes more than that. We began challenging the process by timetabling for literacy programming, taking time to develop overarching questions to answer in the core subjects, and improving learning for kids by looking at what they need and teaching them that particular skill or knowledge. Some curriculum outcomes took a back seat while we taught students to be kind to one another, to read, to learn basic math facts and so on. If the students were interested and engaged in a particular project, we would keep it going, building in skills all the while the students thought they were having fun.

Our resources included the Alberta curriculum for sure, but we added Dawn Reithaug's Three Tiers of Intervention for Reading from the year before and Making a Difference from Alberta Learning's Setting the Direction initiative. We established a school wide approach to encouraging creativity by timetabling our options to include a wide range of choice and mixing up the grades so as to create a more family oriented atmosphere. We were successful and many of our fun activities involved the Junior High students planning activities that would include their younger counterparts. We all ate together and played together. An enormous amount of energy was expended, but it takes energy to make energy. I have never felt so alive!

For year 2, see the next post!