EEND-680 21st Century Ed Leadership Reflection

My biggest takeaway from this class is the power of observation. I was moved by the #observeme movement and even volunteered to have my teammate observe me and participate in my formal evaluation cycle for her Type 75 certification program. It was very liberating to open myself up to critique from my peer and welcome her to my pre/post-conference meetings with my principal.  I enjoyed creating a google form and becoming the evaluator and watching my teammates as well. It really gave me perspective on what principals have to do during our evaluation cycles.

Teacher Observation Google Form

I was really challenged by planning a 30 minute, online, self-paced professional development on the introduction of Twitter. I incorporated some tricks that we've learned through this journey and linked a few slides in my presentation. I am glad that I have more tools in my toolbox because of this curriculum. I was inspired to do this self-paced training on Twitter based on our Capstone Project and asking teachers to use Twitter. I remember how resistant we were at the beginning of this program and how far we've all come. I thought that these "baby steps" into Twitter would be a good first start!

Twitterific

Capstone Project update

The realization that this is a huge undertaking has hit me when I think of how hard it is motivating people to do anything out of their normal day-to-day expectations. The real struggle became glaringly apparent how hard it was to motivate teachers in our district when we were asked to show up to support the negotiations committee by showing up to a board meeting wearing red. I thought there would be hordes of people, a sea of red, a sheer force to be reckoned with, but it wasn't. There were many that showed up in support of the negotiation team and the hard work put in to fight for our contract rights, but not as many as you would think. The level of return on investment should've been very high. This is our salary, insurance, and vacation that we're talking about and still, only about 1/3 of teachers showed up. SO, this gets me to the Capstone Project. How in the world are we going to get investment and teacher buy-in when there is zero return on investment? Incentives are great but we can't really offer anything of much value. Here is a digital badge, or sticker? Somehow we have to figure out a way to make it fun and easy to do. We have to get some buy-in from staff and hopefully encourage a decent level of competition and hopefully turn the spotlight on something encouraging during this bleak negotiation time.
Another struggle is the size of the group. It's tough to motivate a whole class to invest in a project. I like how we broke into smaller more manageable sized groups. From there we must rely on good faith that each group is holding their own and contributing to the success of the project.
I'm excited to see how this all plays out and to hopefully inspire some healthy competition among the grade level teams!