Media bLog

I read the article, “What Do Teachers Bring To Leadership?” in the September 2007 edition of “Educational Leadership.”  It caught my attention because I recently discovered that the Vice Principal at my school is considering creating leadership roles for teachers in the school.  She is thinking about developing small committees of teachers to focus on school issues ranging from school spirit, technology integration, to increasing student enrolment.  In all likelihood, I will end up in the technology integration committee, possibly in the role of committee chair.  For this reason, the article was particularly relevant.

The article outlines what leadership is and offers insight into the special assets that teachers bring to school leadership.  Teacher leaders are in a unique position in that they are able to build strong relationships with colleagues that foster understanding, mutual respect, and trust amongst staff.  Teacher leaders are “are motivated by a desire to help students and support their fellow teachers, not to enforce a new policy or to evaluate others’ competencies. Other teachers can go to teacher leaders without fear of judgment or dismissal. Their conversations can be frank, authentic, and caring.”

Secondly, teacher leaders are able to maintain a sense of purpose.  Teachers who keep their focus on the school’s goals naturally draws others into their vision.  As the article states, “because they are teaching every day, facing the same challenges and reaping the same rewards as their peers, their singular focus on their own instructional work and their commitment to reaching every student act as beacons to those around them.”

Finally, teachers who consistently improve their own teaching practice and who share their concerns, questions, and the problems they’ve encountered creates an open dialogue amongst staff.  This creates a forum where teachers feel safe sharing their worries and/or failures so that a dialogue about improving teaching practice can take place. 

I found this article to be extremely informative and it has helped me to recognize that I have been an ‘unofficial’ within my school.  I am part of one of the “clusters of teachers in which professional relationships and commitments are fostering instructional innovation.”  My capacity has mostly been in the sharing of technology and web 2.0 tools with my colleagues.  I have become the go-to person when a staff or student encounters ‘technical difficulties.’  Therefore, the article has given me some insight as to how I can develop my leadership abilities and how to approach leadership in a way that is not threatening to my colleagues and that will foster a positive working relationship with them.

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Filed under: Leadership

I read another article from ‘Educational Leadership’ entitled “This School Is About Kids.”  The article focuses on standardized tests and whether or not our constant testing has pulled Principals from their duties to the school and the students.  The three concerns presented are:

• Have testing and its accompanying preparation, administration, and reporting functions hijacked our schools’ agendas?
• If “what you test is what you teach,” has the accountability agenda also imprisoned curriculum and instruction?
• And, most important, What is our work—and our responsibility to the broader society—as school leaders? How do we pursue that work in light of current realities?

The author presents responses to these concerns from the principals’ gathering which I don’t entirely agree with.  She posits that “The ‘render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ approach applies.”  While this is true and standardized tests are mandated by law and policy, if standardized tests are choking the education system, whose responsibility is it to speak out and seek reform?  If the principals accept what is, even if they know it is failing, then they are failing the students in the end.  This contradicts the last sentence of her article: “School leaders must articulate the conviction that, above all, the work we do is always about children, not data. This is our social responsibility.”  If the work is always about children, and standardized tests are always pulling principals away from their work in the school, how is this about children?

She also states that principals need to plan time for reflection and for ongoing conversations among fellow educators.  If principals are bogged down with test scores and education policies, how will they find the time to accomplish this?  I know from my experience in my Board that Administration is frequently pulled out of the school for meetings and professional development.  When they are in the school, they are frantically trying to catch up on the work they didn’t do while they were out of the school.

The author also doesn’t provide any suggestions on how to solve the problem of teachers teaching to the test.  She merely states that assessment is important and that principals are “obliged to adapt testing to better serve students, which means being careful to foster and assess learning not covered on the test.”  Again, if the tests are important for data collection and teachers have to cover what’s on them, how do you find the time for these teachers to deliver curriculum that is not on the tests?  I understand why we have to do standardized tests, but there are no suggestions on how the classroom teacher can actually accomplish what she’s asking.

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Filed under: Leadership

I hit on the idea of resistance in a previous blog entry when discussing video games in the curriculum.  I wanted to expand on that in this post and give some background and a more in depth analysis of that resistance and how that affects school leadership.

I have encountered resistance twice in the two short years that I have been teaching at my school.  Both times were the result of my program expanding.  I, naturally, want my program to expand but it didn’t take me very long to realize that others did not share this ambition.  They were, of course, concerned that my program would take students away from their programs.  In a small school, this is a very realistic concern which I recognize.  However, there are reasons that my program is growing while theirs may be shrinking which they do not recognize.  As the eternal diplomat, convincing these teachers of the merit of my program while not dimishing the importance of their program was essential to my success in advancing my program.

My first line of reasoning for these teachers was that the television ‘program’ I inherited from the previous teacher had been greatly diminished from its original standing in the school.  The TV course used to be a grade 11 and 12 program but was cut down to one class when OAC was dropped and moved to a grade 10 credit.  One grade 10 course in high school is not the ‘program’ Administration kept pushing and promoting to parents of incoming students.  Therefore, I had to assure the resistant teachers that returning the TV course into a program by moving it back to grades 11 and 12 was necessary in order to attract more students and work to reverse the pattern of decreasing enrollment.  If we, as a school, are going to push a program as the reason to attend our school, we had better have the program in place to offer them.  I proposed moving the course from grade 10 to grade 11 as one step.  Therefore, there would be no additional courses to take away from other programs, but at least a senior credit in TV Arts would actually help students who wish to go to college or university in this field.

The second, and greater, instance of resistance came when my Vice Principal asked me to be the lead teacher for a Specialist High Skills Major(SHSM) in Communications Technology.  In order to apply for this program from the Ministry of Education, we would have to offer the grade 12 course in Television as well as the newly moved grade 11 course.  The addition of the grade 12 course was met with a significant amount of resistance from teachers with optional senior courses.  Again, the rationale behind this proposal was attracting more students to the school.  Administration recognizes that we either have to take action and start offering more unique programs or risk dying a slow death as enrolment drops each year.

The addition of one more class in grade 12 and convincing teachers of the merits of the SHSM proved to be a significant challenge.  My Vice Principal and I were the only two people on staff who were involved in this initiative and she is very, very busy.  I took it upon myself to do all of the necessary research and investigation into the SHSM program.  Not only did I have to figure out how to apply and what requirements were necessary for us to apply, but I had to research the benefits of the SHSM to students and to the school at large.  I spoke with teachers at other schools who were heading up SHSM programs and asked them about their experiences and how students were responding to being involved in the program.  It also turned out that our unofficial competing school just started to offer the SHSM in Communication Technology last year.  This is the school that we lose students from our feeder schools to. 

My VP held a meeting with the department heads in which I was to propose the SHSM and explain what it was, how it worked, and why it benefited our school.  Due to the extensive research I put into this project, I was able to answer every question that was tossed at me.  Most of the department heads recognized our need as a school to offer unique programs and to keep up with other schools in the Board or risk losing more students.  Most of the teachers recognized the need for change and agreed that we should apply for the SHSM, even if it meant offering a senior course that might take away from other classes.  Two teachers were still resistant; one didn’t want extra work, the other was concerned about losing students to the grade 12 TV course.

While I understand these concerns and tried to assure them that I would probably end up losing English Media students to myself, I also see that if our enrolment continues to decrease at at time when schools are being closed, that we run the risk of not having any of our classes anymore.  We’ll all end up teaching in portables at our ‘competing’ school as their enrolment continues to climb and they overflow at the seams.

Overall, this was a good lesson in diplomacy for me.  I don’t expect to walk into a school and take over or dictate what should happen and why.  I do, however, wish to have my work and effort benefit the students.  If there is growing interest in my course and students are engaged, I can’t apologize for ‘stealing’ students from other teachers.  I understand their fear, but we are all at risk of losing relevance with today’s students.  If I can hook them and draw their interest, I’m afraid that’s something that I will fight for…diplomatically, of course.

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Filed under: Inquiry, Uncategorized

Last week, I ran the workshop on graphic novels with the teachers in the English department.  I had spent the previous couple of weeks collecting and organizing resources that I could present to the group.  I found a number of websites that were helpful but as with all resources on the net, relevant information was scattered across a number of sites.  There was no one definitive online resource for graphic novels.  Teachingcomics.org was the best and most useful site for using graphic novels in the classroom.  I was also given a book on graphic novels that our English consultant gave to the English department head.  This book, “In Graphic Detail,” was the best resource of all.  Imagine that…a book in print was more helpful as an all-in-one resource over anything I could find on the vast internet.

I compiled a package that I would use as a teaching tool with my colleagues and give to them as a resource to use in their own classes.  My department head arranged for me to conduct a workshop after school and called a department meeting for all of the English teachers.  There are six teachers in the school who teach English, including myself with English Media.  Although all of them initially stated that they could attend the workshop, it happened that two of them were called upon to coach the lacrosse team at Zone.  The head coach had taken an unexpected personal leave and the other coach was ill.  We went ahead with the workshop for the remaining teachers.

The workshop went extremely well.  To begin, I opened the workshop with a general discussion on what we all thought of graphic novels.  I heard their concerns and was then able to address them throughout the course of the workshop.  Then I went through the resources and taught them the content in the same manner that they could teach their students.  Through modeling, they could see how the resources would be useful in a classroom situation.  I fielded questions as I worked through the package and this generated some discussion with the rest of the group as the workshop progressed.  The open discussion brought up a lot of concerns they had and gave me the opportunity to point out some strategies they could use.  The discussions also often led right into the next resource I was going to present.   For example, someone would present a concern about their own difficulty in reading graphic novels.  A discussion about how each person’s own strategy in reading graphic novels would follow, and then I would present to them some resources specifically about how to read a graphic novel. 

Overall, the teachers were all thankful for the resources and for me taking the time to sit down with them and share what I learned about graphic novels with them.  I will have to make arrangements to do a make-up workshop with the two teachers who missed this one.

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Filed under: Leadership

I read an article online in Educational Leadership called “Video Games and Civic Engagement.”  The article states that “certain kinds of game play do appear to foster higher levels of civic engagement. The social context of gaming offers opportunities for “civic gaming experiences,” in which players have opportunities to help or guide other players; learn about problems in society; think about moral or ethical issues; help make decisions about how a simulated community, city, or nation should be run; and organize game groups or guilds.”

I found this to be particularly interesting in that most teachers and administrators firmly believe that video games are bad and should be banned in schools.  I disagree wholeheartedly.  It is my goal to develop curriculum in Communications Technology that fully embraces the video games and video game design.   Not only can you encourage students to develop online environments and characters that meet the curriculum expectations for the course, you can also get students thinking about what kind of world they are creating.  How do the characters interact?  What actions are right or wrong in their virtual world?  What behaviours are rewarded in their game?  What actions would cause characters to lose the game?  The possibilities for discussion are endless.

As a school leader, I find myself in the awkward position of having to convince my colleagues of the merit of this type of curriculum.  Students making and playing video games is not deemed ‘relevant’ course content.  There is a perception that Communications Technology is a course where students take it easy and goof around all period.  Or rather, there was that perception when I started working at my school.  It has taken me two years to change this perception within my school.  Now I find my program is growing and more students are signing up.  Students are requesting video equipment and time in the editing lab to work on video projects for their other classes.  Teachers are beginning to see the value of student created video projects.  I hope that I can change their minds about video games as well.

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Filed under: Leadership, Uncategorized