Standard 3: Cultural Leadership
A. Focus on Collaborative Work Environment: The school executive understands and acts on the understanding of the positive role that a collaborative environment can play in the school's culture.
As a principal resident, I was able to participate in weekly PLC meetings. I developed this agenda to normalize how meetings ran and allowed teams to determine what was being discussed in each PLC session. The agenda below is an example of how the team utilized the agenda. Teachers reported that they liked the consistency of the agenda and how it included the norms that we created and agreed to consider during each session. Bi-weekly the administrative team compared this agenda across content areas and grade levels to give feedback to teachers/teams to strengthen instructional practices.
RMS PLC Agenda
B. School Culture and Identity: The school executive develops and uses shared vision, values and goals to define the identify and culture of the school.
As a principal resident, I wanted to understand the school's culture and identity to see how the school defines itself. I was able to complete a community asset map to highlight the Kinston Community. This assignment was completed for our school improvement project. Below is the video I created collecting data of our school community in order to better understand my school's culture. From collecting the data, I used the video to focus on our school and community's rich history and identity.
Community Asset Map
In this program, we have quite a few opportunities to participate in specialized trainings to enhance our leadership skills and abilities. During this training, Dr. Peterson taught us the importance of culture and how culture is the key element to school transformation. This training highlighted next steps for our school wide initiative "We are Rochelle." After returning to my school, I worked with an outside vendor to begin to spread our "brand" throughout our community by creating "We are Rochelle" T-shirts. Below is an agenda of the Shaping School Culture Agenda as well as a picture of my mentor principal and I wearing our newly designed "We are Rochelle" T-shirts.
C. Acknowledges Failures; Celebrates Accomplishments and Rewards: The school executive acknowledges failures and celebrates accomplishments of the school in order to define the identity, culture and performance of the school.
Celebrating Success!
As a principal resident I was able to work with the "100 days brighter" team to conduct a school wide 100 days brighter initiative. At RMS, teachers had not worked together to celebrate the success of themselves or their students. I challenged each team to display ways that their students had grown in the 100 days that they had been in school. In the picture to the left, I worked with my 6th grade team to celebrate how our students have become "brighter" in 100 days. Some ways teachers highlighted how students have become "brighter" in 100 days is in their behavioral choices, English benchmarks, and school-wide attendance. Teachers have since tried to celebrate small gains on each grade level.
To the left is a picture of myself and the downstairs sixth grade team wearing our shirts inspired by the "100 days brighter" initiative.
To the left is a picture of myself and the downstairs sixth grade team wearing our shirts inspired by the "100 days brighter" initiative.
D. Efficacy and Empowerment: The school executive develops a sense of efficacy and empowerment among staff which influences the school's identity, culture and performance.
In my role as an administrator, I have had the privilege to support teacher efficacy and empowerment. At RMS, teachers were not receiving consistent feedback after walkthrough observations. The artifact below is an email conversation between one of my teachers and myself. I shared with her the "glows" and "grows" of her lesson. After receiving the feedback given from the observation, the teacher implemented interactive notebooks that included content writing. She also commented about how relevant, timely, and encouraging the feedback was to her.