Continuous Growth and Development

ISLLC Standard 2: A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the success of all students by
advocating, nurturing, and sustaining a school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning and staff professional growth.

Continuous improvement should be embedded in the language of every building leader. Without improving the way schools function, there will be no progress in place. Therefore, building leaders have to also have a continuous improvement mindset about themselves and their growth. Over the course of my internship, I had the opportunity to attend conferences that provided the opportunity to expand my knowledge of leadership and professional growth.

Evaluation

Cluster Meetings

Leadership Team

Field-Testing

TAP Core Leadership Conference

Alice Harte Charter uses The System for Teacher and Student Advancement (TAP) evaluation tool for assessing continuous growth and development among teachers, other staff, and administrators. TAP has developed a comprehensive system for evaluating teachers outlined in the TAP Teaching Skills, Knowledge, and Responsibilities (SKR) Performance Standards, otherwise known as the TAP Instructional Rubric. The TAP Instructional Rubric is a set of clearly defined standards that promote best practices and apply to all content areas.Teachers are well-prepared for their evaluations through multiple training opportunities on the TAP rubric and through TAP’s continuous professional “cluster group” meetings. Each teacher is evaluated four (4) times a year by multiple evaluators (including principals, assistant principals, master teachers, and mentor teachers) who are trained and certified according to these standards. All evaluations are followed up with a post-conference sessions between the observed teacher and the evaluator to discuss specific reinforcements and refinements based on the instructional rubric, which is intended to help the teacher strengthen his/her instructional practices.

Reflection: In reflecting on the TAP Core Evaluation Conference attended, I believe the information was useful for my growth as a potential building leader. One change that I would make is to not just require administrators to attend the conference, but also require teachers to attend as a professional development. One of the biggest issues that we have with teachers at my school is the hatred toward evaluations, mainly because they don't understand the purpose or how the system works to improve teacher effectiveness. Therefore, once teachers attend the in-service, they will have a better understanding of how they are being evaluated and why they are being evaluated. This is important because everyone has to share a growth mindset in order to continuously improve.

Once the leadership team creates the school plan (the school, yearly cluster and cluster cycle goals), the cluster leaders identify researched-based strategies to meet the identified student needs. The Cluster Long Range Plan and the Cluster Meeting Record are tools used to plan and evaluate how cluster groups implement these strategies. As the Leadership Team utilizes these tools, they must keep in mind that the primary factor in evaluating cluster effectiveness is the continual use of formative and summative assessments. The Cluster Long Range Plan and the Cluster Meeting Record provide cluster groups direction and assess the quality of TAP processes. The documentation in a TAP school is used as a tool to drive and monitor the process of improving student achievement by improving teaching performance.

Reflection: The purpose of this conference was to give prospective building leaders and opportunity to gain knowledge and experience in the area of professional development and providing and evaluating cluster meetings. Not only is it important for building leaders to know that professional developments are being provided for staff, but it is also important that leaders know how to rate the effectiveness of cluster meetings and professional development opportunities. Over the course of this conference, I was able to learn how to rate the effectiveness of a professional development and cluster meeting, which will improve my practices because professional development is an integral part of school improvement. Once given the opportunity to be a building leader, I will use my knowledge from this conference to ensure all professional development opportunities promote a focus on student learning consistent with the school vision and goals

The role of the leadership team and of the individual members within the leadership team is clearly defined by the four essential tasks of EVERY leadership team:

1) To develop and monitor progress toward meeting school plan goals leading to increased student achievement.

2) To plan for and monitor effective cluster operations that directly lead to increased teacher proficiency and student achievement in specific areas of need.

3) To plan and implement an evaluation and post-conference schedule while continually working to strengthen each team member’s skill with evaluating and conferencing, and to use the data from the evaluations to monitor and address score inflation.

4) To monitor Individual Growth Plans, how they are supported, and movement toward meeting both student achievement and teacher improvement goals.

In addition to these four roles, teams may also have other areas which they address during leadership team meetings, however, the meetings must focus on factors that directly increase student achievement.

Reflection: This conference outlined the most important aspect of being a building leader. While the Leadership Team members take on many hats through the school day, the overall goal is to ensure barriers to student learning are identified, clarified, and addressed. I've always been a fan of the being a leader who promotes collaboration, and this is just what having a school leadership team stands for. Therefore, even if the school I become a leader for does not use the TAP Evaluation system, I will still implement this system into my daily practice.

Once the cluster cycle goal is developed, and the pre-assessment given and developed, the leadership team identifies appropriate research-based instructional strategies to field test. Cluster leaders are expected to field test the student strategies that are disseminated in cluster for a variety of reasons.

1.The first purpose is to ensure that the strategy is effective raising students’ achievement in the targeted area of need.

2. The field test also gives the leadership team the opportunity to gather anecdotal and concrete evidence about the effect of the strategy and the appropriate segmenting/sequencing of the strategy to ensure student growth.

3. Finally, the field test is also the time when the leadership team identifies the critical attributes of the strategy that enable it to be effective. Once this step is complete, the cluster leader then can present this information in cluster and provide documented success that the verify the effectiveness of the student strategy.

Reflection: I believe it is imperative for building leaders to know the ins and outs of field testing. Although this may not be the area that leaders deal with first-hand, it is still important that instructional coaches and mentors are trained to effectively field-test strategies. If need be, teachers can also be used to field-test strategies, but of course the buy-in should come from the building leader first. This conference gave me the opportunity to feel comfortable and knowledgeable as a future building leader when it comes to ensuring that staff know how to research, develop, and test strategies that will help to improve student achievement.