Standard 1: Strategic Leadership
A. School vision, Mission and strategic Goals: The school's identity, in part, is derived from the vision, mission, values, belief and goals of the school, the processes used to establish these attributes, and the ways they are embodied in the life of the school community.
As a principal resident at Rochelle Middle School with Ms. Solomon, the new principal, I found that the mission and vision had not been revisited or revised. In the assignment below, I developed a questionaire for the staff to assess our school's identity, for Distinguished Leadership in Practice class. After assessing my school's identity and discussing, ways that I would like to increase this effort as I move forward, I shared the findings with my mentor principal to begin trying to reestablish our school's vision and mission. Out of our dialogue the "We are Rochelle" initiative began in an effort to restore RMS's history and rebrand our school's future vision, mission, values, and beliefs. Below is the School Identity Needs Assessment survey that I created to gain feedback from staff.
Assessing and Enhancing Your School's Identity
B. Leading Change: The school executive articulates a vision and implementation strategies for improvements and changes which result in improved achievement for all students.
RMS We Are Rochelle "Tree of Life"
Based on the indications from the Assessing and Enhancing Your School's Identity survey, the development of the "We are Rochelle" initiative began with all staff working together to develop our "tree of life." My role, in this effort, was to share with staff the purpose and the vision of the tree to enhance future school pride and overall achievement. The leaves on the tree represent staff buy-in in an effort to rebrand our school's identity.
To the left is the "Tree of Life" we developed in an effort to begin our school wide initiative.
To the left is the "Tree of Life" we developed in an effort to begin our school wide initiative.
C. School Improvement Plan: The school improvement plan provides the structure for the vision. Values, goals and changes necessary for improved achievement for all students.
As a principal resident, I am a member of the School Improvement Team (SIT). During the meetings, I discussed the school's current D (low performing) academic rating as well as the goals that we have for the school year. The team and I also reviewed indicators and evidences that have been accomplished or are on-going in order to meet our goals for increased student performance. The picture below is a copy of our school improvement goals.
School Improvement Goals
RMS's School Improvement Indistar Sign in information
D. Distributive Leadership: The school executive creates and utilizes processes to distribute leadership and decision making throughout the school.
As a principal resident, I was able to work with teachers in discussing flexible grouping options for students based on their dissagregated grade level benchmark data. Because the concept of PLCs were not an embedded approach at RMS, prior to this meeting, I facilitated two PLC meetings in which I modeled how to look at benchmark data, determined areas of strength/weakness using the DeFour model, and provided teachers will best practices in order to correctively instruct students who were not proficient. After modeling the process of PLC, leadership was distributed to department chairs in order to make the best instructional decisions for their students. In this meeting, teachers brought in assessment data, used DeFour's questions, and determined the next steps in their instruction. The picture below depicts a very thorough PLC meeting with my team discussing student achievement. We also initiated discussions on the planning of a math curriculum night based on the data collected from our NC Check-Ins.
PLC Meeting with grade level
MTSS Agenda
As a principal resident, I have had the opportunity to serve as a member of the MTSS committee. The purpose of this committee was to support teachers in immediate actions and interventions in order to support student academic growth. My role as a committee member was to provide research-based intervention strategies to teachers, create MTSS agenda, and take notes on what teachers should be doing. Leadership was distributed to teachers by offering different roles such as: time keeper, task manager, data digger, etc. Having the different roles in the committee made each meeting more efficient and effective. Above is an MTSS agenda I created for our meeting. During each meeting, short-term and long-term goals were discussed and progress was shared with the team. If students were making progress, interventions continued. If students were not making progress, interventions would be changed to meet the needs of the students.