Administrative Standards Alignment

Heather Kortlandt

By PresenterMedia.com

Standard 1: Performances The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities ensuring that the district vision is developed, articulated, implemented, and maintained with community involvement.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
The "Leadership Capacity Project" embodies this standard as it's primary purpose is to use the leadership teams to implement district initiatives. I have developed systematic approaches for these school level leaders to disseminate information and monitor large scale PLC projects/goals. This group also helps to facilitate the district vision of clearly understanding the vertical alignment and is charged with the understanding of what a single child might experience when they move through our system in Mathematics K-12 and Writing K-12.

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1.1 - The administrator will develop points, ideas, and direction of a personal vision relevant to the knowledge and theories applicable to school-level leaders applied to the school district context;

Day 2- What is Curriculum Leadership Vision?- In this session a guaranteed and viable curriculum was stressed. From this session I added to my vision that our a big piece of our leadership capacity project would have to include the teacher leaders clearly understanding and ensuring the vertical alignment (beginning with Writing and Math) and that we would commit to using this group to help implement the common core. With this as my personal vision, the leadership teams began to work through the Written curriculum, the Tested Curriculum and the Taught Curriculum. Day 3- The What & How of Curriculum focused on a guaranteed a viable curriculum. When this piece was presented to the vertical teams, they discovered that there was not a coherent guaranteed and viable curriculum that had vertical flow to it.

Standard 1: Performances The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities ensuring that the district vision is developed, articulated, implemented, and maintained with community involvement.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
1.2 - The administrator will demonstrate the skills needed to work with the board of education and district/community members to facilitate the development of a vision of learning for a school district that promotes the success of all students;

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Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
In order to communicate and facilitate the development of the vision (building systems of leadership capacity to promote student achievement)with all stakeholders for our district, the skillsets I needed to demonstrate was that of Collaboration-what is it and what is expected? Supporting teachers in the PLC process both with in a subject/grade level and vertically Communications with all major groups on the work being done by the two new leadership teams Some ways I did this are: 1. A parent survey was given which defined PLC work for parents and surveyed them to see what their preference on Early Release vs. Late Start models would be. 2. Board of Education reports outlining the PLC process and individual PLC projects including structure of the work and student results. 3. Board of Education updates given on the vertical leadership team progress 4. Otsego School Improvement Committee reports(team is district wide with parent, student and board representations as well) given on CCSS and our transition including vertical leadership team updates

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Day 7-Accountable Learning Communities This session reviewed the cultural shifts that Dufour cites as necessary for a school to shift from a traditional school/district to a PLC school/district as well as provided an article by Rebecca DuFour titled Central Office support for Learning Communities. In this article DeFour cites two main pleas for central office administrators. These are limiting initiatives and coordinating all central office services to support those initiatives. This allows our principals and teachers to focus on results of a few items rather than on checking off activities to work on many different initiatives. With this in mind, our two primary district focusses for all became Math and Writing to kick this project off.

Standard 1: Performances The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities ensuring that the district vision is developed, articulated, implemented, and maintained with community involvement.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
All of our work toward student achievement gains is data-based and uses Dufour's PLC model to monitor student achievement. It also marries Mike Mattos' RtI research and systems to reach all learners. The district hosted Mike Mattos at a county-wide professional development day which included every teacher and tutor in our district. Every building is working to implement the 4 Cs which includes Certain Access- a commitment by educators and schools to systematically ensure that every student receives the time and support they need for learning Certain Access involves targeted use of data to support Tier 2 additional supports and then evaluates progress using a systematic, system wide approach. Adapted with permission from Simplifying Response to Intervention-Solution Tree 2011
We use Delta Math data-K-8, MEAP, MME, ACT, common assessment, STAR, and DIBELS to base our instructional and district decisions upon within our leadership team, and on down to individual PLCs.

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1.3 - The administrator will use data-based research strategies to assure the district vision takes into account the diversity of learners in a district;

Day 7-Accountable Learning Communities Because you cant have RtI without PLCs, I chose to align this standard to day7. This session reviewed the cultural shifts that Dufour cites as necessary for a school to shift from a traditional school/district to a PLC school/district. Introducing DeFours questions ultimately leads a PLC through a process that creates accountability for all learners:
1. What is it that you want students to learn? 2. How will you know when they have? 3. What will you do if they havent? 4. What will you do for those that have?

Standard 2: Performances The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities that promote positive school culture and provide effective instructional programs that apply best practices to student learning and incorporate comprehensive professional growth plans.

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Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation

Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
When this change initiative began, the CCSS were just being introduced in our district (fall of 2011). It was also a rotational curriculum purchase year for mathematics which at first seemed like good timing. However, by working with our vertical Math team to review the CCSS and specifically begin to understand the Mathematical Practices and what would be needed to articulate the CCSS instructionally, it became very clear that there wasnt a K-12 text that we felt did justice. Instead of using one hundred thousand dollars plus to purchase more books, I worked with administration and the vertical team to instead invest resources in teacher training, and development of the MAISA units that had at the time been recently released. This was a major shift in resource allocation for our district.

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2.5- The administrator will revise allocation of resources and justify revisions according to needs to sustain or improve the instructional program

Day 9- Learning Leader-Planning and Managing Resources During day 9, an implementation audit was presented to us which used a 2x2 matrix to evaluate a programs impact vs its implementation level. This activity was meant to help central office administrators evaluate programs in times of economic troubles. Although our math programming was also evaluated by data and declining scores, this helped me see the vision of reallocating resources to instead invest in the professionals to gain a return for students.

Standard 2: Performances The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities that promote positive school culture and provide effective instructional programs that apply best practices to student learning and incorporate comprehensive professional growth plans.

ON TARGET

Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation

Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
The Leadership Capacity Project has presented the Vertical leadership teams with student achievement data on the district level using the Golden Package, our Data warehouse, Mischool data and local assessments to analyze differences among subgroups. The Vertical Math team is currently working through a process by which it is writing and evaluating their assessments by deciding if it is measuring what we want them to and looking to see where instruction explicitly matches the assessment items.

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2.9 - The administrator will adopt appropriate research strategies to profile student performance in the district and to analyze differences among subgroups;

Day 4- Balanced Assessment and Accountability. In this session we analyzed all the assessment types that go on in each of our districts and then had to decide how balanced we were. We also were given rubrics to share to learn to assess our assessments. This is imperative to be able to judge whether our assessments are even measuring what we want.

Standard 2: Performances The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities that promote positive school culture and provide effective instructional programs that apply best practices to student learning and incorporate comprehensive professional growth plans.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
A large part of building leadership capacity was making sure the teachers on the leadership teams for Writing and Math were up to speed with the CCSS, and more important sound instructional practices. It was evident when I took this position that we only had small pockets of teachers using (according to Hatties meta analysis) some of the large effect-sized practices. Some of these included clear learning targets, frequent formative assessment processes, PLC process, RtI, and a solid infusion of rigor. In order to build this within our core leadership team, professional development needed to be carefully planned out. Beginning in the spring of 2011-12 and continuing through 2012-13, we used title II money to bring in both ELA and Math consultants to do close work with the CCSS unpacking. Next, we took our entire Math leadership team to MCTM in August of 2013 in order to attend the full- day MAISA workshops because the MAISA units have been the main focus of the Math leadership team. Finally, for the 2013-14 school year we sent all 20 of our Writing and Math Leadership team members to training at our AESA with Linda Jordan on performance tasks and instructional practices to support the next generation of testing. For our entire staff, we worked our EA unit to build an entire professional development day in our district around Mike Mattos which our AESA paid to bring in. This was a powerful plan that is already beginning to pay off.

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2.10 The administrator will design comprehensive professional growth plans and apply adult learning strategies, technology and research to professional development design in at least two of the following areas: mentoring, coaching, professional learning communities, co-developing authentic work tasks that promote new knowledge and skills in the workplace;

Every session of CLI that I attended modeled good professional development in one way or another. Many sessions were specifically designed so that the activities we participated in, could be used with leadership groups. I have incorporated several of these over the past two and a half years. These include use of inside my control/outside my control, the carousel activity, the PLC dream activity and many more.

Standard 3.0:Performances- The administrator facilitates processes, and engages in activities ensuring effective management of the organization, operations, and resources.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
3.3-The administrator will insure that operational plans and procedures to achieve the vision of the district are in place, including collective bargaining and other contractual agreements;

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Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
Our EA contract was up for the 2013-14 school year and I began working on negotiations with the superintendent in the early spring of 2013. This was a particularly rough negotiation cycle as our district has been experiencing some rough financial patches which included several lay-offs last spring. I was part of the entire process of negotiations which wrapped up in December of 2013, but there were a few areas in particular that were a large part of securing our districts vision for leadership teams to help student achievement. Once of these pieces was the length of the contact time with students. We were able to negotiate contact time with students to increase from 26 hours (or less in some buildings) per week to 27 hours per week. This was vital to the change initiative process because it built in hours over the 1098 to allow for early release time not only at the middle school and high school (which was implemented through this CI in the winter of 2012), but now for elementary as well for the 2014-15 school year. This was vitally important as the research says you must find ways for teachers to examine assessment data and plan for instructional changes or RtI during their work day. This is very important to provided support to our teachers in the PLC process. Another important piece of this negotiation round was working with the EA on the calendar so that we could align one of our PD days with the date Mike Mattos was coming to our county allowing all staff to hear the same message and for our district to host. This was difficult because it took the AESA months to work with solution tree on a date for him to come. The EA worked with administration and allowed flexibility in the calendar so that we could land our PD day on the date selected by Solution Tree. After this PD occurred, we had an amazing amount of momentum towards our initiatives to advanced student achievement along with many saying that now they understand all that we have been working towards. This was a collaborative effort during a very tough negotiation round.

Support From the Curriculum Leaders Institute

The day 7 session on PLCs and PD is where much of the support for these two negotiations pieces were. It was important to me to find ways to support the PLC efforts in our district with time for teachers to meet during their work day. When learning communities function at a high level, teachers workload is much greater. To help, the district needs to provide time. Tying in the work we did with our EA to our Mike Mattos PD day is also important to our vision. The relevance of Mattos work with RtI (which can not be done effectively without PLCs) was reinforced for me through the learning in day 7 as well.

Standard 3.0:Performances- The administrator facilitates processes, and engages in activities ensuring effective management of the organization, operations, and resources.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
3.7-The administrator will involve stakeholders in aligning resources and priorities to maximize ownership and accountability;

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Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
Part of my role as a curriculum leader for the district is to organize our district stakeholder group which we call OSIC (Otsego School Improvement Council). This group was not accomplishing much it met a few times a year and its main focus was on approving curriculum purchases to go to the board each year. With my CI process and wanting to build leadership capacity for our district, I quickly changed the emphasis of this group to be on student achievement and also to give them more ownership in the district improvement plan. We started with sharing a few key visionary pieces with them which included our Boards strategic plan, and then a diagram which I call Systems Thinking which includes all aspects of instruction that we want to see infused in all classrooms and then the vehicle behind which that can happen. Once OSIC saw the big picture, they were able then to help us answer questions on our District Process Rubric and give input into the District Improvement Plan. This group has provided great feedback to the curriculum/instructional leaders and is well on its way to functioning at a much higher level by taking more ownership in the creation and evaluation of district plans and programs. Since this group is part of our process for curriculum purchase approval, it has been vital to help them understand that we are in a much more fluid state of buying tangible textbooks and that we need to shift our allocation of resources to more professional development for teachers and technology.

Support From the Curriculum Leaders Institute

The learning from Day 6-creating cultures of Learning. In fact the post assessment for Day 6 (because I had to attend this day with cohort 6) was much more application in nature. I took the learning from that day and applied it to one of my vertical team meetings where I had the team collaboratively design the agenda. The example I give here in this slide with my OSIC committee was also reinforced by day 7 in that I have used the Eight Attributes of High Quality Relationships for myself to assess where I feel I am at with the OSIC group in each of the 8 areas. I think that this is a good check in piece for me to use to be sure my relationship with the group is such that I can call on them to be involved as stakeholders and feel safe and comfortable sharing their opinions.

Standard 3.0:Performances- The administrator facilitates processes, and engages in activities ensuring effective management of the organization, operations, and resources.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
3.12 The administrator will creatively seek new resources to facilitate learning;

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Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
In my role at central office, I have continually looked for ways to shift allocations or look for additional outside funding to work towards student achievement. In the two and a half years of my change initiative I have some evidence of this. First was our shift from buying Math textbooks to focusing on professional development on Common Core and the next generations of assessments and by moving to the MAISA units for math. This allowed us to use title II funds and only spend on the order of $10,000 of our curriculum budget rather than the required $160,000 it would have been to outfit our district with text books. We thought this prudent as in our opinion there was is not a great match to the Common Core on the market. We then shifted money to our tech department to continue adding student rolling labs of net books and iPads. This is allowing our teachers to find more engaging math lessons using the technology and reinforcements like IXL. Next, I applied and received the MDE Robotics grant as well as the ARGOSY grant and established a Robotics team for our district with eight engineering mentors from the community. We also received over $2500 in donations from community businesses for Robotics. In the winter of 2012, I applied for a casino grant through Gun Lake Casino for a reading intervention program (Read 180), but did not hear back from them. I often work with our AESA to see what types of resources they can help with as well. An example of this was this fall I organized a group of 30 middle school students to a day for Math exploration called Super Staturday. The AESA provided funding for the bus that was used for the field trip. I have also worked with the AESA on sending a field trip of students to Grand Valleys Southwest Math and Science Symposium each year where students from around the State present research they have done with a mentor in industry or at the university level. We send a group through the AESAs support every year and on average place one or more students on WMUs campus to conduct their own research project to present. These are some examples of seeking out resources and student opportunities to facilitate learning that I have been able to do through creative funding or resource seeking.

Support From the Curriculum Leaders Institute

From the conversations in day 9 discussing resources, the scarcity of them these days in education and truly assessing what is worth spending the money on, not only launching me into creative thinking about new resources, but also thinking about resources that are already allocated and whether or not they should be continued to be allocated where they are. Day 9 provided us with tools for assessments of programs, which now will be quite useful in the new program evaluation diagnostic in ASSIST.

Standard 4.0 Performance-The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities that ensure collaboration.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
4.4-The administrator will develop and implement a plan for nurturing relationships with community leaders and reaching out to different business, religious, political, and service organizations to strengthen programs and support district goals

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Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
In my role in curriculum and instruction, I have had some opportunities to reach out to the community for support and relationships building between us. Some of the work with community that I have done involves the reproductive health committee which includes parents, students, teachers, and clergy. This has been a group that also tangentially has related to my goals of building leadership capacity in others. I started a FIRST Robotics team for our high school this year and through that I have gotten to know 8 local engineers some of which are local business owners through which I have been able to discuss some of the engineering components we want to instill in our students in the program. Working with community as teachers in a sense has really been exciting and again supports capacity for student achievement within our student body by going to the outside to find support and skill sets that were necessary. I have reached out to local businesses in a variety of other ways one that directly supports the Math leadership team is when I reached out to a local company that requires a manufacturing test in order to gain entry level factory type work. They shared the test which primarily consisted of math and our math leadership team will now use this assessment to ask ourselves, what math skills will we guarantee that ALL kids graduate with so that they can gain local employment.

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The sessions that contributed the most thought about relationships and nurturing those were days 9 and 6, but I felt like that was really a theme throughout. In education, a people business, it is vital to nurture good relationships. From the central office role, community relationships become vital for the health of the school.

Standard 4.0 Performance-The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities that ensure collaboration.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation 4.9-The administrator will respond to community interests and needs, and facilitate and engage in activities that reflect an ability to inform district decision-making by collecting and organizing formal and informal information from multiple stakeholders; Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
During the time that I have been working on my Change Initiative, I have been involved in two different committees that have hosted community forums to help in decision-making processes. The first one began in the fall of 2011 when our district began to explore two concepts with scheduling that could impact student achievement. One was a implementing a balanced calendar concept and one was flipping the start times of the secondary with the elementary buildings. We began in Central Office by gathering a committee of parents, community members, teachers and administrators to discuss both topics. The switching of start times, although research on the teenage brain versus the elementary student brain was presented, was quickly dismissed as something that would not be supported by the community. The balanced calendar idea however, did gain momentum and led us to present our ideas in a bigger venue of several community forums. I was able to facilitate one of those and the feedback at all three was very mixed. About half of the parents/community members were very excited about the idea when research on the summer slide was given and sample calendar ideas were shared. Conversely, about half were very against it, citing that the long history of the summer break, student summer jobs, and family vacations during that time were very important. From this and data we collected from a survey, it was not something we felt we could confidently move forward with and have a strong majority support. It was a great experience though and one allowed me to see the importance of taking the temperature of the community and all stakeholders at large. Had the balanced calendar idea taken hold allowing the district to move forward, I feel my change initiative would have taken on a different feel because the leadership teams would have had a different model for learning to work around. We could have even had more consistent year-round meetings ourselves. Although the end result was no change for our district, it was an important learning process for me.

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Day 1- Leadership and ChangeAs reflect on that session, the article The Limits of Change in the Harvard Education Letter from Feb. 2002, discussed the reality that changing structures doesnt really help achievement if there is no change in instructional practices. Although a more balanced calendar is appealing to me to help fight the summer slide, I have learned that this alone will not impact student achievement greatly.

Standard 4.0 Performance-The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities that ensure collaboration.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
4.13 The administrator will advocate for students with special and exceptional needs and be responsive to their families needs using consistent, ongoing communication

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Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
Within the area of special education, I had most of my influence as assistant principal, a role in which I worked during the 10-11, 11-12 and a bit of the 1213 school year. My current job in central office overlapped with the assistant principal role until November of 2012 and then my duties shifted completely to central office. While I was assistant principal, one of my personal concentrations within the high school building was the special education programming and students. Beginning with being the administrator responsible for all IEP meetings, it became clear to me that these students were often so overwhelmed that the approach in high school was focused on how to get them through rather than on what can we get them to master and be good at. While working with parents and staff on this, I began to help the special education PLC focus on developing essential standards for their caseload students in their co-taught classrooms. They then took those identified standards and shared them with the general education teacher for feedback. The next step was to take the general education assessment and modify it to match the identified standards. From here the special education teacher began to take on the role in creating formative assessments so that their responsibility to the students in their co-taught classes were to get them to a solid, independent level of understanding on those essential skills. The goal was for students to independently take these assessments and reach success (which for many was for the first time) on those standards. By narrowing the focus, it allowed for this to happen. Before I left the role and took on other duties, this responsive action to the needs of the students was being worked on in Biology, Economics and Math. When this plan was communicated with parents, they were in support of the process. Some initial data that I saw on the Biology unit tests that had been modified were very strong with students independently scoring Bs and Cs.

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Although the standard here is advocating for special needs students through communication, Im going to default back to PLCs (Day 7) for several reasons. First of all, when the special needs teachers began their learning communities, which included the general education teacher, a much more direct and frequent look at standards based achievement and mastery began. With this new focus, more responsiveness with families can happen.

Standard 5.0 Performance-The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities ensuring that he/she acts fairly, ethically, and with integrity.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
5.2-The administrator will establish and uphold policies that hold self and others accountable for acting with integrity and exercising ethical behavior

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Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
In the beginning stages of our leadership teams for Math and Writing we spent time getting to know what each grade level did in the classroom. This included the curriculum used and then topics taught. We did this to establish trust and learn to work together and make decisions on behalf of the district within these two content areas that were represented. Once we had this trust, we could function as a team to make the best decisions for the district.

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Day #9 with Debbie Macfalone went into some literature and ideas based around trust. From that session I learned about Lencionis Five Team Functions and also have read Coveys book Speed of Trust . What I have leaned is that without trust a group can not function. One take-away from this session was a quote that Debbie gave which was relational trust is central to building effective educational communities.Trust erodes when incompetence is not addressed. When having frank discussions about what was going on in the district, I had to be careful to balance when information was presented that might warrant a need for change in a classroom and infer how it was presented. Was it presented in a way that demanded confidence versus a way that was meant for wanting change to occur? In other words, were team members telling me these things because they wanted administration to do something about it, or were they just trying to make everyone aware of the types of things going on in the district. This is a very sensitive situation, that I tried hard to read. When necessary I would probe further with individuals to get a grasp on the situation presented and decide how to proceed.

Standard 5.0 Performance-The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities ensuring that he/she acts fairly, ethically, and with integrity.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
5.6-The administrator will consider the impact of ones administrative practices on others

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Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
This particular standard really speaks to me because in my position I continually reflect on my practices and decision-making because it affects not only students but teachers and their jobs and duties. With and increased district alignment and creation of leadership teams, comes fear and resistance at times. Peers leading peers has dynamics in and of itself. Increased focus on PLCs as our modus operandi is a major shift in how teachers do their jobs. I am sensitive to this and through round table discussions with EA members, one-on-one discussions with teachers and through our Math Writing leadership teams, I take opportunities to make sure everyone understands the why behind PLCs and the power in moving student achievement. Every Monday morning I meet with my superintendent/mentor and have similar discussions always asking myself, are we doing the right thing, are we headed down the right path and finally are we supporting our teaching in carrying out our vision. Since I work with all buildings in my district we also reflect with principals along these same lines every other week as we implement PLCs and RtI/MTSS.

Support From the Curriculum Leaders Institute

All sessions really supported me in working towards this standard. Ive mentioned before that in all 9 sessions if I were to pick on underlying commonality, it would be relationships and trust. These two components should be a large part of what an administrator pays attention to as they reflect on their impact of their practices. The other big pieces for me as related to my change initiative were specifically the sessions on PLCs, resource evaluation, Leadership and Change.

Standard 5.0 Performance-The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities ensuring that he/she acts fairly, ethically, and with integrity.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
5.8-The administrator will make and explain decisions based upon ethical and legal principles

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Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
With my change initiative focus being on Leadership Capacity to promote student achievement, I have had to have many conversations about why we need to shift our culture to a PLC/RtI culture. The ethic principals that come into play stem from one question, do we believe all kids can learn at high levels. This is a very difficult conversation to have because outside factors play a role like socio-economics and family dynamics. When an educational staff wraps their minds about what is in our control and what is out of our control and then acts to work toward mastery through PLCs and MTSS with all the pieces that we can control, increased student achievement can occur. One big piece of what I am describing here is one of Mike Mattos 4 Cs and that is concentrated instruction. By identifying essential skills that teachers guarantee all students will master based on criteria outlined by Marzano (endurance, leverage and Prep for the next level), teachers can ensure all students will learn at a high level on standards/skills that have the most impact on future learning. Mike Mattos is very clear that if a staff member doesnt believe all students can learn at a high level, then RtI work becomes very difficult to them. One example we give to our teachers is that a student of poverty may enter Kindergarten with a vocabulary of 400 words where a student not from poverty may enter with 4,000 words; however, this in no way shape or form means that student of poverty isnt capable of learning at the same level as the other student it simply means we must identify gaps early and work to close those.

Support From the Curriculum Leaders Institute

In session five we did a very valuable activity that I have taken several groups through. It was called in our control/out of our control and it forces us to use a circle to write down what we believed was in our control and then we had to place what we believed was out of our control outside the circle. The beauty of this activity was that it allows you first to discuss as a full group whether all of the things that individuals placed in the outside of the circle were really things we had no control over at all. Then, it allows a group to then have specific places to put their focus on so that we can stop using the other factor as excuses for lack of achievement. With one group I used this activity and spun it towards what are our fears about PLC work and then used the same diagram to focus our energies.

ON TARGET

All kids can learn at high levels!

Standard 6.0 Performance-The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities ensuring responsiveness to the larger cultural context
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
6.4-The administrator will demonstrate the ability to work with local board of education members and political leaders at the local, state, and national level

ON TARGET

Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
Beginning in the winter of the 11-12 school year, I began working with the school board on a revised strategic plan. After meeting with them, the director of elementary instruction and the superintendent at a retreat January of 2012, we outlined the essential instructional pieces of the plan. From there, I implemented a strategic plan review document to monitor the plan an assure the board that our main energy is spent on articulating the plan. Many of the main pieces of the strategic come right from my change initiative project. These include K-12 articulation which is the main goal of the two leadership teams, a district writing scope and sequence, PLCs, the use of data to promote student achievement and RtI implementation K-12. This document and the conversations surrounding it with the Board of Education laid the foundation for this project.

Support From the Curriculum Leaders Institute

The support form the CLI that I used to assist the Board of Education with the strategic plan development and now the execution of it really came from many of the sessions but it should be noted that the focus of the instructional aspects of the plan is on data, PLCs, RtI, Vertical articulation, the Common Core and Writing.

Standard 6.0 Performance-The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities ensuring responsiveness to the larger cultural context
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
6.9-The administrator will communicate regularly with all segments of the district/commu nity concerning trends, issues, and policies affecting the district

ON TARGET

Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
I meet with the OSIC (Otsego School Improvement Council) 5 times per year as well as the leadership teams (as needed), the principal team(every two weeks), the Board of Education(twice per month), staff meetings (as needed), as well as a quarterly curriculum newsletter in order to communicate with all segments of the districts. Something I learned very quickly is that it takes quite an effort to communicate district goals as some people need to hear them multiple times in different situations before they begin to take root. Communication is a constant effort and a main focus for my change initiative project.

Support From the Curriculum Leaders Institute

There were a couple of occasions within the CLI where something was discussed that made me recommit to making communication with all parties a priority. One was day one where we discussed the importance of the why for people. If this isnt communicated clearly, then people often stray from the path or vision because they have nothing solid that draws them there. I have learned throughout my project and CLI that effective communication comes in many forms for all stakeholders many times repeated. Make the goals and vision clear and say it often in many ways always reiterating the why.

Standard 6.0 Performance-The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities ensuring responsiveness to the larger cultural context
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
6.11-The administrator will advocate for policies and programs that promote equitable learning opportunities and success for all students, regardless of socioeconomic background, ethnicity, gender, disability, or other individual characteristics.

ON TARGET

Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
With the foundation of this project being professional learning communities driven, the force behind the momentum is data. Everything the leadership groups do is data driven. Two of our main sources for this data are the Golden Package and MiSchool data which both break down the data by economically disadvantaged, gender, race, and special needs. This assures that we are examining all populations in our decision making. We have found through this process that we struggle with our economic diversity and white boys. Both of these groups tend to under perform others.

Support From the Curriculum Leaders Institute

Day 7 on PLCs and Day 9 on program evaluation along with our districts strategic plan emphasizing data, it goes without saying that we use our PLCs and our district teams to disaggregate data and study our subgroups.

Standard 7.0 Performance-The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities that comprehensively apply technology to advancement of student achievement.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
7.3-The administrator will advocate to the school community, the media, and the community at large for effective technology use in schools for improved student learning and efficiency of operations.

ON TARGET

Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
Since I began my role at central office, we quickly realized that technology and curriculum/instruction should not be two separate entities. We have tried to merge the two in several ways to support achievement. The first way we did this was when we revamped our districts strategic plan and too out a section specifically designated to technology and instead infused technology objectives into each one of the goal areas. We also reallocated our funds from curriculum to technology realizing that we need to get away from the idea that we must continue to purchase text books in the six figure amounts each year when we have more engaging routes for students to interact with. The technology director and I went to the board and used our TTI-Trig grant money to purchase 35 Ipads and did a 1:1 pilot in a social studies classroom this school year. Additional support for this standard comes when we meet with our leadership teams and work on curriculum mapping, we encourage our teachers to assign homework from online, gaming like websites as we know this is how generation Z learns best. With the average student only spending a little over 2 seconds on any given webpage, we know our pace in the classroom needs to be sharp and snappy. We are gearing our instruction towards these learners.

Support From the Curriculum Leaders Institute

Day 1 helped to frame this shift from the separation of Curriculum and Technology in our district towards the integration of the two. If we dont know what is relevant to todays learners and their learning styles, then how can we be sure the we are delivering effective instruction?

Standard 7.0 Performance-The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities that comprehensively apply technology to advancement of student achievement.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
7.10-The administrator will engage in sustained, jobrelated professional learning using technology

ON TARGET

Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
It is important that if a district wants their teachers to use technology as the center of their instruction, they must themselves be current and model that. I have tried to do this myself through the change initiative process. Once example is when the director of elementary instruction and I used Camtasia to do a flipped instruction example of an agenda for an upcoming OSIC meeting (Otsego School Improvement Council). We did this to give some preview of the topics we were going to discuss, but to also model what could be done in the classroom. Another example of how I have learned to use new technology in order to model it was this fall when we wanted our social studies and science teachers to give a pre and post test on the grade band benchmarks in order to prepare kids for the MEAP and get them caught up from the summer slide. We wanted these tests to be online because our students were going to take the MEAP online for those subjects this fall. So, I learned how to use the free assessment site called Socrative and entered in the assessments for the teachers. I then worked with them to administer them and showed them how to view the data feedback. This spring I plan to attend the MACUL conference as well with staff members and hope to bring back ideas for our leadership teams.

Support From the Curriculum Leaders Institute

http://www.scree ncast.com/t/ODCZ SWZgxf2y

The CLI helped me articulate this standard through sessions relating to days 5 and 9. It is important that the administrator be a learning leader when it comes to technology. Please click on the link above to see the Camptasia example explained in the evidence for this standard.

Standard 7.0 Performance-The administrator facilitates processes and engages in activities that comprehensively apply technology to advancement of student achievement.
Standard for Central Office Administrator Preparation
7.15-The administrator will engage school leaders in using district-wide and disaggregated data to identify improvement targets at the program, building, and district level

ON TARGET

Evidence Change Initiative AlignmentBuilding Systems of Leadership Capacity to Promote Student Achievement
This standard embodies exactly how I began and conduct our Math and Writing Leadership teams. The first time we met, two and a half years ago we looked at various data points using the Golden Package and broke performances down on the Math MEAP by standard and by different subgroups. We did this to try to identify district weaknesses. If was glaringly obvious that fractions, one of the most high leverage mathematical topics was a hole for all subgroups in all grades that tested those concepts. We coupled this looks at district data with the shifts needed in both ELA and Math for the CCSS and studied the concepts that are the highest leverage skill sets for Algebra readiness. When we did this, we were easily able to identify improvement targets for each content area. Teachers had looked at data a little at each of their building levels, but had never had a district view. Working with our two leadership teams, we are instilling that our district will be one in which any child will have a guaranteed and viable curriculum and a similar experience no matter what buildings they move through. Bringing the leadership teams together and looking at districtwide data allowed the leaders to create a focus and take on the charge of working together to lead the district in the vision of using data and PLCs to work towards our goals.

Support From the Curriculum Leaders Institute

Day 7 on PLCs and Day 9 on program evaluation helped me frame some of my connection of the CLI to this standard. Since our district emphasizes data, it goes without saying that we use our PLCs and our district teams to disaggregate data student achievement deficits and identify needs at all levels.