Standard Four: Human Resource Leadership
School executives will ensure that the school is a professional learning community. School executives will ensure that processes and systems are in place that result in the recruitment, induction, support, evaluation, development and retention of a high-performing staff. The school executive must engage and empower accomplished teachers in a distributive leadership manner, including support of teachers in day-to-day decisions such as discipline, communication with parents, and protecting teachers from duties that interfere with teaching. They also must practice fair and consistent evaluation of teachers. The school executive must engage teachers and other professional staff in conversations to plan their career paths and support district succession planning.
4A. Professional Development/Learning Communities
The school executive ensures that the school is a professional learning community.
Global Curriculum PD
One of the ways I ensure my residency school was a professional learning community (PLC) was by serving as the Global School Coordinator and facilitating professional development utilizing the Participate Learning platform. Our district is in its third year of requiring teachers to complete global competency training. In the artifacts below, I created a handout for staff explaining the process for obtaining a Global Educator Badge as well as the implications of exposing students to Global awareness. I was also asked to present this information at our district-wide professional development conference AmplifyECPS.
Building Meaningful Relationships PD
One of our strategic goals at Pattillo is to provide a collaborative, inclusive, welcoming, and safe school environment. During the fall semester, I led a professional development session with our staff on building meaningful relationships with students. During this PD, I engaged staff in discussions around what it means to our school and for our kids to build positive staff-student relationships. Additionally, I led staff in completing an exercise where each staff placed a dot next to every student's name that they felt they had a meaningful relationship with. This data allowed us to identify which students we should target to ensure that we are fulfilling our goal of inclusiveness.
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4B. Recruiting, Hiring, Placing and Mentoring of staff
The school executive establishes processes and systems in order to ensure a high-quality, high-performing staff.
Interviewing Candidates
At the start of our school year, our Instructional Coach was promoted to Assistant Principal. This left a vacancy that we needed to fill. During my residency, I had the opportunity to serve on the Interview Committee in search of someone to fill this role. In our recruitment efforts, we received multiple applications. I was able to reach out to a candidate who had submitted an application and coordinate the scheduling of her interview as well as share further information on our school context.
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Classroom Management Support
Providing feedback and support to teachers is an important role of being an effective instructional leader and school administrator that serves as a mentor to staff. In seeking to provide support to one of our beginning teachers, I provided her feedback on her classroom management strategies. In addition to giving specific action items that the teacher could incorporate I also was able to facilitate a learning walk to another teacher's class so the beginning teacher could observe best practices. |
4C. Teacher and Staff Evaluation
The school executive evaluates teachers and other staff in a fair and equitable manner with the focus on improving performance and, thus, student achievement.
Observation Schedule
During my residency, I conducted formal observations of teachers in compliance with our district evaluations timeline. It was important to me that teachers had a voice in when their observations would occur so that they felt empowered in the process. So, I created a calendar for teachers to sign up and schedule a time for me to come. This also ensured that I established a clear timeline for getting the observations done and met required deadlines.
Reminder and Follow-Up Emails
Prior to conducting a teacher's formal observation, I sent him/her a confirmation email and included a link to the pre-conference form that the administrative team at Pattillo utilizes. After completing the evaluation in NCEES, I would send the teacher a follow-up email outlining the steps they should take to acknowledge our pre-conference meeting in NCEES as well as the agenda items for our post-conference discussion.
Example of Reminder Email
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Example of Follow-Up Email
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