MODULE II: NOVICE LEVEL

(offered in Summer 2011)

***Prerequisite: Level I completion

Strand A: Multi-level Systemic Approach to Teaching and Learning

Leadership is an ever-changing dynamic process requiring continual reflection, revision, and re-energizing of one’s attitudes, knowledge and skills. Strand A is designed to facilitate leadership transformation and energize and accelerate one’s thinking about priorities, goals and purpose. .

Essential Components in Module II: Teachers impact student learning!

In a blog post titled Hoarding Culture or Sharing Culture, Rob Jacobs provides the following descriptions:

Hoarding Culture— teachers and schools keep their expertise, their knowledge, their ideas, and their innovations to themselves.

Sharing Culture—- these teachers know that their fellow teachers, their fellow principals, and their fellow schools can benefit and should benefit from their knowledge, ideas, creativity, and information. Sharers get a “reward” out of helping others benefit from what they know.

Jacobs introduces us to an approach to knowledge management called “Yokoten.”

“The Japanese word means “taking from one place to another.” Toyota’s culture is a sharing culture. They correctly understand that knowledge, ideas, and data are organizational resources. A good idea should not be wasted but should be implemented. In addition, and this is key, a good idea should not just be used in a single location, but should be exported to all parts of the organization. Their sharing culture obligates that an individual share with their peers and leaders are expected to circulate good ideas throughout the organization.”

Jacobs’ descriptions fit with the progressive flow of Professional Learning Communities.
At the initial stage, individuals meeting, you often hear people complaining that they have to go to the meeting: “this is my time, I should be doing my work”; with the emphasis on MY, it’s a hoarding culture.

The first step forward is when teachers begin helping each other. ”When I had a student like that, I found this worked”… When a teacher’s shared idea or strategy is accepted with appreciation, a sharing culture begins to grow. When teachers find that ideas from colleagues improve student learning, commitment to time in PLCs increases.

Franchises are formed when teacher share their creativity with each other and work together to design instructional or assessment strategies together, such as 9 week common assessments or a unit of instruction. In the early stages of franchising, strategies designed together are implemented individually. A team designs a common assessment but doesn’t look at each other’s lesson plans.

As PLCs progress from franchises toward teams, teachers begin to modify their individual practices to align with others creating a consistent practice that benefits students. A PLC of freshman teachers decides on common notebook criteria for their courses that encourages organizational skills. A 6-7-8 middle school PLC implements common expectations for students over the three years.

At full implementation, PLCs become teams. Members take shared responsibility for student success. On a K-1-2 vertical PLC where the team has the same students over three years, members share responsibility for all the students across the three years. On a high school science PLC a biology teacher assumes responsibility for students’ success in chemistry.

Student achievement is important- too important -for a hoarding culture or working as individuals. Our students deserve the best that sharing and teaming can offer. In Strand B, Teacher Leaders/Coaches will find clarity and purpose in their roles and relationships around team coaching.

Five Strategies of Team Coaching

  • Creating Possibilities
  • Determining Purpose
  • Communicating Powerfully
  • Taking Responsibility
  • Manifesting and Sustaining Change

Implementation of Team Coaching to support team members to:

  • Use clearly defined components and decision rules in order to standardize the process that teams must follow to ensure that unnecessary referrals for special education evaluation are avoided.
  • Identify key challenges and issues
  • Accelerate qualitative and quantitative results
  • Set objectives and achieve breakthrough results
  • Engage innovation and the wisdom of the group in creating desired outcomes
  • Be accountable for changes and actions and receive support from the group
  • Develop a clear vision and a results focus based on your values
  • Develop skills, tools, and behaviors that support your success

 

 

Strand B: Personal Leadership Skill Development – First Be A Leader to Yourself Understanding and Transforming Ourselves

Teacher leaders will develop a deeper and more complex understanding of the critical skills related to powerfully addressing and managing emotions in collaborative relationships.

In much of our culture, emotions are not allowed; either experienced or talked about. In fact, they are often the ‘soft stuff’ of coaching and therefore seen as ‘expendable’. More than ever we need to accept that our emotions are part of us. As students learned in Module I, if not addressed, these emotions create blocks to progress that keep us and our team ‘stuck’ in the same place. Now, in partnership with an equine coach, there is a way to acknowledge and manage these emotions, clearing a path for powerful movement forward; a leadership skill that will be embodied through participants’ experiential learning with their equine partner and taken back to the PLC….for implementation without the horses!

  • The messages behind emotions—
    • What are they?
    • How do we recognize them?
    • What can they tell us about ourselves, our supervisors, colleagues, students and their parents?
    • How to address emotions in professional settings—
      • Gain practical insights on how to manage emotions, especially so-called negative ones, within ourselves and others.
      • How to recognize “blocks”—
        • What to do when we become aware of them?
        • How is this of value to you and to those with whom you are working?
        • Case studies on how this has worked with individuals and teams

 

Note: Dale Vidmar’s (Southern Oregon University) thoughts on emotion, reflection and coaching:

As instructors reflect upon their experience in the classroom with a colleague, they discover important information about the intended results in comparison with the actual lesson. They share both accomplishments and frustrations. By making the collegial conversations part of instruction, instructors build upon the everyday classroom experiences, complementing class time with the conversations before and after teaching. They learn to be conscious in the classroom, using the thinking that goes along with performance to manage their actions. They address and self-monitor their teaching practice on a continual basis, ultimately learning not by experience alone, but through critical reflection upon their experiences.


“Reflective Peer Coaching: Crafting Collaborative Self-Assessment in Teaching.” Research Strategies. 20 (3). 2005. 135-148.

 

Strand C: Toolbox – Peer Coaching through the Response to Intervention Process: What Should Teachers and Students Know and Be Able to Do at Tier I?

The foci of Strand C at Level II:

ASCD’s Advancing Formative Assessment In Every Classroom…a Guide for Instructional Leaders and identifying how to build more formative assessment questions into our coaching.

“In too many classrooms, teachers and their students are flying blind. Teachers cannot point to strong evidence of exactly what their students know and exactly where their students are in relation to daily classroom learning goals. The lack of detailed and current evidence makes it particularly difficult for teachers to provide effective feedback that describes for students the next steps they should take to improve. Students are operating in the dark as well. Without the benefit of knowing how to assess and regulate their own learning, they try to perform well on assignments without knowing exactly where they are headed, what they need to do to get there, and how they will tell when they have arrived.” (pg 9)

I. Observing Learners

Teacher leaders will learn to lead their colleagues through classroom observations where teachers spend time observing student learners and are non-evaluative. The purpose of the observation is to decide if students are doing what they need to do in order to achieve.

The thinking behind the activity is: teachers don’t cause student achievement; students cause student achievement. The teacher’s task is to create the right learning activities, environment and desire for individual students. This requires constant observation and continued adjustment on the teacher’s part.

Observations in colleague’s classrooms provide an opportunity to “watch learners” with an intensity and insight that differs from observations done while teaching. After the observations coaches will learn to debrief the group, making critical connections to Tier I instruction and Tier II decision-making.

II. Transitioning to Tier II

Teacher Leaders will learn that Tier II is for students who are falling behind same-age peers and need additional, targeted interventions to meet grade-level expectations. In Tier II, the goal is to accelerate learning for students who need more intensive support. In Tier II, the interventions typically take place in an alternate setting or at an alternate time, in addition to instruction received at Tier I, and may include instruction to small groups of students, targeted interventions, and frequent progress monitoring.

Teacher leaders will continue in Module II with:

  • resources to identify scientific, research-based core curriculum in core content areas
  • resources to identify scientific, research-based instructional strategies
  • differentiated and explicit instructional strategies, and resources to obtain further training
  • resources to identify scientific, research-based interventions
  • resources regarding remediation and intervention strategies
  • comprehensive CBM resource listing
  • tools they need to effectively collect, analyze, and publish progress monitoring data from short-cycle assessments and CBMs
  • student, classroom and school site fidelity checklists
  • · components and decision rules for Tier I & II; moving students from Tier II to Tier III or reverse course

Strand D: Equine Experiential Facilitated Learning as a Strategy for Authentic Leading

Clear and Direct Communication through Listening

Horses do not deal in ambiguity. When horses communicate, they are not trying to please you or avoid confrontation; what you see is what you get, and they expect the same from you. Horses thrive on direct communication that keeps things clear and congruent in their environment. What you tell them is to what they react. If you are not clear about what you want from them, it becomes obvious, because they either do what they think you have asked of them, or they become anxious because of the ambiguity. Often a lack of clarity on the human’s part leads to equine reactions that are misinterpreted as ‘bad’ behavior, such as aggression or flight.

Isn’t that what often happens in the human side of life? We think we are communicating our needs clearly and when people don’t respond the way we think they should, we don’t think very highly of them. We decide they are not smart, have a bad attitude, are too uptight or just don’t ‘get’ it, and we end up not trusting them to do the things they need to do. Horses show us how much communication and trust are linked. They need us to be clear about what we want and clear about how we ask for it. They mirror for us how to make decisions based on how well we understand the situation, how we are able to apply discernment to the situation, and “connect the dots”.

 

 

From the work of Margaret Wheatley in support of the way in which our equine coaches….coach us:
….leaders need freedom to make intelligent decisions based on how well they understand the situation rather than how well they understand the policies and procedures. They need to trust that people will invent their own solutions and to expect and value the unique solutions that emerge. Compliance to one-size-fits all will no longer serve our global and local needs. Leaders need to know that they can rely on human creativity, compassion, caring, potential, and self organizing capacities. (pg 26)

 

The following diagram is one created by Steven Barkley and is adapted from the book, A Simpler Way by Wheatly and Kellner-Rogers. It illustrates the interconnection of three key elements in an organization, the system:

The flow of information- How do we organize for information to flow throughout the system.. working for everyone to know everything.. grade to grade….department to department…school to home to school…student to teacher to leadership, etc.

Rich and diverse relationships- How do we organize for the development of relationships? How do we use staff development and faculty meeting for building relationships? Do we communicate the importance of relationships in classrooms and learning?

Common vision- How do we organize so that conversations where we connect with each other around common beliefs and the desired future continually occur?

“The work of educational leaders is to encourage local experiments, to watch for and nourish supportive beliefs and dynamics, and to sponsor faculty and staff to connect with all the kindred spirits now working in isolation. This is how we intentionally work with emergence to create the future we desire.”
How Large-Scale Change Really Happens – Working With Emergence
Margaret Wheatley Ed.D. and Deborah Frieze ©2006 The School Administrator Spring 2007

Strand D provides the Teacher Leader/Coach with tools to “intentionally work with emergence to create the future we desire”….and provides such tools in partnership with horses!