In ECI 508, Teachers as Leaders, Dr. Grifenhagen engaged us in learning about all aspects of leadership, including leadership styles, attributes of leaders, and leadership for literacy, and we applied our learning through various projects.
One of our semester-long assignments was to complete a series of leadership activities to put our learning into practice. The first activity I engaged in involved data analysis, collaboration with my colleagues, and leading my colleagues by using my experience and knowledge to help them make informed decisions about class placement. I went through the reading assessments that we completed this fall for all students with reading goals in their IEPs and pulled data about decoding/sight word recognition levels. Based on this data, I identified areas of concern, such a students who are reading as a low level but not placed in one of our decoding classes or students who may need to be moved out. I set up a meeting with the two other decoding teachers and facilitated a discussion about the data and requested IEP meetings to change paperwork as needed. We also looked over the year's data and progress monitoring for our three current groups and moved students around accordingly. This was not required by my school but was something I took on to make sure that our students with IEPs were receiving appropriate reading services.
My second leadership activity involved collaborating with another middle school special education teacher and a coordinating teacher for special education literacy to create a professional development session for other middle school special education literacy teachers. We met several times to plan and facilitated the half-day training together. Topics covered included appropriate class placement for students with reading disabilities, instructional resources, ways to differentiate instruction, different types of assessment, choosing novels, challenges we face as educators and possible solutions, literacy shifts as a result of the move toward the Common Core State Standards, and more. Rather than having a typical "Sit-and-Get" training, we worked hard to make this training personalized and interactive through frequent feedback from our audience, collaborative activities, and analysis of real student scenarios.
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Dr. Grifenhagen also challenged us to develop our leadership skills through completing a needs based assessment and strategic plan (see below).
We were required to collect and analyze data related to literacy at the PLC, team, grade level, or whole-school level, summarize the data, and create a strategic plan for professional development, curriculum, and/or instruction including one or more goals, action steps, and timeline, keeping in mind the school's context and diverse learners and incorporating research to strengthen our decisions.
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Another part of our leadership class included engaging in a Coaching Cycle using the Practice-Based Coaching framework we studied together.
In this coaching cycle, I followed the following steps:
1. Pre-observation meeting: I worked together with a colleague at my school to establish a goal and action steps that she is working on and agree on a focus for the observation 2. Observe: I conducted a focused observation, taking notes and data to share with the teacher related to the specific practices she wanted to implement or improve 3. Debrief: We had a meeting where we revisited the teacher's goal and action steps and I provided both supportive and constructive feedback on the target practices grounded in data and student responses. See below for my notes and reflection on this experience! |