Domain IV Reflection:
This domain has become increasingly important and relevant to me over the past year as I have seen great coaches and mentors at work in our schools and taken on many informal coaching roles as well. I have learned that as an enthusiastic life-long learner, many people will seek out your advice and help to try ideas they have seen you implement or areas of strength they know you to possess. I have already become a go-to for many creative tech or maker space related conversations at my new school as I naturally enjoy coaching others and seek out opportunities to share and collaborate with colleagues. The roles of educational leaders vary more now than ever before with the existence of more and more specialised coaching roles, particularly in the international school systems. It is important for educational leaders to be prepared to give and mentor their staff and colleagues as part of a collaborative learning experience that can strengthen a school and have positive impact on student learning.
Artifacts:
Teaching and Learning Core Team MemberAs a member of the Teaching and Learning Core team during the past academic year, I was completely immersed in all things teaching and learning. Our team took proven research, initiatives and pedagogies that had been vetted and successfully pass through our R&D and worked to incorporate them into our school wide teaching and learning practices. In particular, I worked with a cross divisional team to focus on defining 21st century skills for our school and creating k-12 rubrics to assess these skills. Our work was deeply engrained in the research and findings from R&D and was part of an ongoing effort that began before I joined the team (in identifying, selecting and beginning to define the skills our school would use) and will reach completion this year. Other T&L task forces worked on Professional Development, Teacher Evaluation and Supporting High Achieving students.
Currently Seeking Coaching RoleDue to my passion for collaborating with colleagues and empowering teachers to reach their full potential, I have begun focusing on obtaining a coaching role at Concordia. I feel I will be able to serve the community effectively due to my enthusiasm, knowledge and skill sets that enable and inspire me to problem-solve and think critically about new ideas and planning innovative projects. Attached is a job description I have created for my school that I could very possibly fill in the coming year, along with my own informal "tech CV" that was shared with administrators at Concordia to get to know my strengths and skills and passions. I see the powerful impact coaching can have on improving teaching practices and enhancing student learning and am excited at the prospect of sharing my leadership and insights in this way.
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Specialist Team Leader (2012-14)I served as a specialist team leader for 2 years at the American School of Bombay. I represented a team of anywhere from 14-18 teachers- no small team! There were significant challenges to representing such a large group: no common time to meet as well as a variety of needs and interests. In this time I acted as a liaison between ES administration and the specialists and handled concerns or ideas proposed by specialist teachers for school wide consideration. Attached is our running google doc Team Leader Agenda for the past academic year.
Observation by Instructional CoachOur school has full time instructional coaches that meet with grade level teams to collect and reflect on data from math and literacy units and use the data to inform next steps in unit planning and student progress. While this has been highly successful for grade level teams, I felt a lack of support in this area for specialists and approached the coaches about their plans or abilities to extend their support to specialist subjects as well. I requested our instructional coach, Shannon Gallagher to meet with me, complete a classroom observation and reflect together on how specialists could better utilize the coaches in our school and the data collected in our classrooms. While we had very rich conversations about the challenges and the nature of incorporating specialists into their coaching cycles, we both agreed there is still great work to be done in this area in our school (and most schools) as specialists typically receive less support from instructional coaches and tend to plan more in isolation. Attached are Shannon's notes including our conversation about data in the ES specialist subjects, her observations of my class lesson and concluding thoughts and reflections on this experience.
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