Teacher Leadership Standard 6 Reflection: Commucating and Collaborating with a Variety of Stakeholders

Standard 6 Reflection: Communicate and collaborate with a variety of stakeholders

Background

Before starting my master’s in Teacher Leadership, I thought I had pretty good understanding of communicating and collaborating with a variety of stakeholders.  

To begin with I come from an innovative school district that believes communication and collaboration is important between our administrators and staff is important in order for our students to be successful.  This is done through a decision making matrix that each building’s staff votes at the beginning of the school year, so that all are in agreement of how decisions how are made in their particular building.  We also have an Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) which meets with our administration team once a month to discuss any concerns. Our ILT is made up of department heads as well as grade level representatives.  Since we don’t meet monthly with our departments I worked with administrators to create a communication tree to make

sure all staff was receiving the information that needed to be shared as well so others would know who their representative was if they had concerns that needed be brought to ILT.

Additional, my district does believe that collaboration between staff members will also be beneficial for our students.  Therefore, we have early release Fridays set aside for professional development opportunities. Half of our early release Fridays are set aside

for whole group or department time while the other half are set aside for self-directed time.  We also have a few hours of district paid time to work on our TPEP (Teacher/ Principal Evaluation Program) as part of our contracts. Additionally, we give teachers the opportunity to join a book study or participate in the Powerful Learning Conference to take sessions of their choice for clock hours through the Center for Collaborative Support which is made up of several neighboring districts.

Lastly, we also work with organizations and individuals within our community to help us meet the needs of our students.  At the district level we have several committees that not only have district staff, but also community members on them. The idea behind doing this is that it helps provide accurate communication with our community in addition to our Tahoma Matters electronic newsletter and hopefully will help us pass bonds and levies as well.  We also have a Parent Teacher Association (PTA) or

Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) at each of our schools which help recruit volunteers

and provides funding for our program.  The local food bank is another organization that we partner up with as they send home food for the weekend for families in need through

our schools. The oldest student of each family served picks up a backpack of food on Fridays and then returns the backpack on Monday to refilled during the week.  Lastly, we have had a church organization that sends volunteers in to our school to help with lunches. They eat with students and then help supervise/play with our students outside.

Learning and Applied Practice

My learning on this standard started with my Engaging Communities class were learned more about those who are represented in the communities we serve.  Those groups of individuals included parents as businesses, as well as those with special needs,come from different cultures and/or those who live in poverty with the focus of engaging them within our our school community.  To do this not only did we read articles and have discussions about these groups, but we also went out to our community to take a closer look and wrote up our School Community Exegesis with the intent of seeing the make up of community clearer.  Finally, with all of the information we had gathered throughout the course we wrote up a plan of how to engage our communities in our schools in our Community Engagement Project.

I continued to learn more about this standard in my Collaboration and Collaboration:  

Parents, Colleagues, Community class.  We started off the course by learning how professional development has change in the world of education over the years.   The article “Exploring New Approaches to Teachers Leadership” discussed how the focus on leadership has changed from being on the principal or superintendent in the 1980’s to the teachers in the 2000’s.  The first model was where the leadership was done by more than one person on a key task or function. Model two was where leadership is an organization-wide resource of power and influence. The last model is hybrid of the other two models. The article concluded by saying that for any of

these distributive leadership models to be effective they need to have support of the principal or superintendent and strong internal leadership.

 

Then we explored a variety of professional training methods that meet the needs

of adults.  These included PLC’s (Professional Learning Communities), Book Studies, Critical Friends Groups, Lesson Study, and Learning Circles.  As we looked through these methods two challenges that really stood out for me were the getting buy-in from staff and the amount time it takes to complete the process once you have found

a focus.  I think one of the best ways to get buy in from staff is to have people talk about their experiences with these methods. By tell their stories it gets to people’s

hearts and helps other staff members understand “why” it is important to be engaged in the method and not get caught up with the “how”.   Additionally, as stated earlier you need to have your administration support and a specific focus to be able to do this since we all have limited amount of time that we can ask our staff to put in training.

Using all of this information that we have learned throughout this course we then created plan for a professional training opportunity using one of the professional training methods we had studied.  Once I had decided upon my focus of Backward Design, I decided that lesson studywould work best for my staff to study it.   As with any of the methods we had studied, I saw time, trust among staff, and buy-in as the most challenges.  But, I also saw that it would help teachers have a greater understanding of the curriculum they are teaching, provide stronger relationships between staff, and provide better available lesson plans.

Issues Encountered/Problems of Practice Addressed

When I was doing my School Community Exegesis, it was more evident than before, that the two middle schools in our district have a very different clientele as ours tends to have the older developments as well as apartments and trailer parks while the other school’s students come from the newer part of town.  When we realigned the district three years ago social-economics was to be one of the factors, but from what I saw while doing this project that did not happen. As a result we have students with more needs, yet less resources to serve them. Through having a common curriculum and collaboration among staff we have been able to move our state testing scores to be much closer to the other school.  We have new low income housing going into the other middle school’s coverage area, so it should be interesting to see how that changes

their school dynamics.

Time, trust, and buy-in are the biggest challenges to communication and collaboration among the variety of stakeholders we have in our schools. Time is always going to be a constraint. As a result we need to get creative with the time that we do have to work with each other collaboratively as well narrowing our focus. So we need to make sure we have a purpose for the meeting, but we also need to start and stop our meetings on

time. Trust also takes time to gain. One piece of advice my principal gave to me on this is to pick a small change that you are confident that you can pull off and be clear why this change is being made. By doing this you will be able to build trust among your staff, but trust does take time. Lastly, in our interview, he gave me the following advice about getting buy in from your staff.  The first is to be smart about the data you use. Don’t just listen to the few “loud voices”, but also look at other data points such as SBAC scores and year’s growth data as well as surveys done by the district around instructional practices. Next, use stories to get to the heart of your staff because that is where you get the most buy in. Lastly, come back to the topic and follow up as it helps show that you think the topic is important to address and it provides an

accountability piece for your staff because they want to look goodin front of their peers.

How Communication and Collaboration with a Variety of Stakeholders is Supported by Research

As part of the Collaboration and Collaboration:  Parents, Colleagues, Community class we look at how adults learn differently than students.  This was interesting to

me since I had not thought of this before. In my school we have been learning good instructional practices in our professional trainings and as a result we have applied those learnings to our professional development sessions.  This not only helps staff experience how to use different strategies and techniques to help students learn, but also to learn more deeply just like their students will. But, while reading the chapters in “Pillars of Andragogy” we did learn that there were differences between how adults and children learn. These included that adults have more emotional baggage,

they are more motivated if they get to research or study with others with the same focus, women learn better by working with, stories of success can motivate them to try something outside of their comfort zone, and that mentoring is important.  So as we a leading and planning professional development opportunities we can address these in order to make these opportunities more meaningful and therefore valued.

Though the Don’t Forget the Families Report “focused on the relationships in families, the broader vision highlights the power and need to understand and strengthen a web of important adult and peer relationships across all areas of kids’ lives” (Pekel,, Roehlkepartain, Syvertsen, & Scales, 2015, pg. 4) show us how important everyone in

the “village” is needed to help our youth’s success.  Therefore we need to make sure we are communicating and collaborating with stakeholders that are outside of our school community.

Overall Impact

Our families structures are changing and becoming being diverse and as I have progressed through this masters program,  I have realized how important it is to provide opportunities for all students, parents and community members to be part of the solution.  Often as educators we feel like we should be the experts, but there

are so many factors that influence our students ability to be successful learnings.     If we are willing to hear and truly listen we can improve our students chances of success.

We also need to support students, parents and community in building relationships.   With technology becoming a greater part of our lives, parents and children have

more difficulty having meaningful relationships and focusing their attention on each other.  One way that our district has helped start a conversation around this issue was by sponsoring a upcoming community viewing of “Screenagers: Growing up in Digital Age” which gave parents tips about how help us and our students balance our time with technology and build relationships between parents and their children.

Additionally,  in our schools we need to continue to focus on the strengths our families and the communities we serve in order to build upon those relationships that will help all of our students be successful.  By “counteracting the negative stereotypes” we can “create a different cultural narrative (and organizational norms) about the strengths of all types of families and their contributions to our communities and society.” (Pekel, et al., 2015,  pgs.54/55).  We need to continue to remind parents how important they are in their child’s life even though they may not feel so as  parents of pre-adolescents and provide support.

As can be seen, even though I came into my Collaboration and Collaboration:  Parents, Colleagues, Community class with quite a bit of experience as a participant and leader of professional learning opportunities, I believe that I have learned many things that will help me to be a more effective leader of professional trainings.  As I move forward with my position of a teacher leader, I also will use the advice I received from  my interview with my principal of “make meaningful, but small changes, something you know you will have success with in order to build up trust in order to help others grow” and “to step back and listening to what the staff believes” (McGrath).

References

Pekel, K., Roehlkepartain, E. C., Syvertsen, A. K., & Scales, P. C. (2015). Don’t forget the
families: The missing piece in America’s effort to help all children succeed.
Minneapolis, MN

McGrath, A. (2018, October 21).  Principal Interview [Personal interview)

Pillars of andragogy. (2001). New directions for adult and continuing education, 89.

Pekel, K., Roehlkepartain, E. C., Syvertsen, A. K., & Scales, P. C. (2015).Don’t forget the
families: The missing piece in America’s effort to help all children succeed.Minneapolis,
MN:Search Institute.

Smylie, M. A., Conley, S., & Marks, H. M. (n.d.). Exploring new approaches to teacher
    leadership for school improvement. In New Approaches to Teacher Leadership. (pp.
   162-  188).

Zepeda, S. (2008). Professional development: what works. New York: Eye on Education.