Educational Leadership Reflective Journal

Over the last 3 weeks, I have had the opportunity to work in 3 different middle schools.  Each one has its own unique learning organization.  Generally speaking, the needs of all of these schools are going to be very similar as each will see an increase in class sizes and an increase in Smartboard access.  Although Chapter 2 focuses on a school-wide vision of curriculum planning, I think the role of an administrator will be to facilitate the building of collaborative lesson planning during specific subject area meetings.  Starting small may be easier to invoke real change.

This concept is described as “Stage 1:  developing the shared vision of curriculum”.  I see this vision more on the line of subject area planning.  For example, when the math 6 teachers meet during their 90 minute collaborative planning session, an administrator needs to be present.  The first goal of this meeting is to develop this shared vision.  I imagine that the group could develop “norms” or a set of guidelines for how to spend this meeting time.  Developing themes for teaching, creating common assessments, analyzing the results of the assessments, incorporating new technology such as smartboards into lessons, etc…  There should be no time for griping and the administrator can help those that don’t collaborate well with others.    

I personally think that stage 6:  evaluating and assessing results, needs to be done within the first couple of weeks of school.  This can be done by harvesting data from Business Objects: a database that houses a wide array of student data including grades, benchmark testing, sol results, discipline reports, etc…  Administrators are the only ones that have access to this database, and the information does not perfectly align with the data from the state, but broad conclusions can be obtained from this information.  My first instructional goal for this upcoming school year is to have an analysis report ready for teachers to look at even before students come into the building.  Do student grades correlate with SOL test results?  Data that points to this answer could help to improve assessment practices by teachers.  On another note, if the team develops a collaborative assessment, then an administrator can help facilitate the analysis of this data.  How did students perform?  Did some groups do better than others?  Based on my previous experience, this type of collaborative planning does not occur often enough.  It should be done more than once a week.

Chapter 4 also looks at some very broad concepts involving motivation and lesson planning.  I do agree that the malleability of technology allows for it to bend into the various motivations of unique students.  It’s the concept differentiation at its finest.  I also agree with the benefits of thematic instruction, but the example provided in the book is unclear.  Since this article was written prior to standards based instruction, it seems that the minimum proficiencies or concepts that students will be expected to master are missing.  The trick is to be able to incorporate several proficiencies into one thematic lesson.  Some courses, such as math, make this very difficult.