Standard 2: Instructional Leadership
A. Focus on Learning and Teaching, Curriculum, Instruction and assessment: The school executive leads the discussion about standards for curriculum, instruction and assessment based on research and best practices in order to establish and achieve high expectations for students.
As a principal resident, one of my first challenges was to collect data to gain a better understanding of how teachers felt about PLCs and how we could work together to strengthen them. I created this Needs Assessment tool to help teachers gain an understanding of where they are, where they need to go, and how they are going to get there to increase student achievement. From this data, I was able to schedule a specific day for our PLCs and set up norms for our sessions. After the needs assessment, the focus of PLCs became much more structured and centered around best instructional practices. Below is the Needs Assessment I created where teachers shared their concerns about our current practices as it relates to PLCs.
,As a principal resident, completing walkthrough observations became a way to strengthen instruction, provide clarity on best teaching practices, and stay abreast of what teachers are doing in their classrooms. Providing feedback to teachers, after the completion of each walkthrough, was very beneficial. During this particular walkthrough, the focus was on formative assessments and how we could strengthen this piece in each classroom. Below is a picture of the section and the feedback that a teacher received from me after I visited her classroom.
Walkthrough Feedback
B. Focus on Instructional Time: The school executive creates processes and schedules which protect teachers from disruptions of instructional or preparation time.
The picture is the FINAL academic calendar. During our summer planning, there was no concrete schedule created that would support our high exceptional student population. The schedule was revised several times to consider our large EC population and ensure their times were correct and aligned with core classes. I worked to create times that our EC students could receive their services so that it would not interfere with their core instructional time. I had the task of ensuring that each class was balanced. I was also tasked with reviewing their EVAAS data to group students accordingly. I was proud to have supported the work of developing this academic schedule with the administrative team. Below is the final schedule.
Below is a picture of a walkthrough observation schedule that I created to protect the time of our administrative team an our instructional coach. This schedule was designed to highlight effective teaching during peek instructional times. The goal of this schedule was to ensure that our administrative team had enough scheduled time to complete the required number of walkthrough observations per week.