Reflections on my Growth Plan (2013-14)

Our collective vision of a Sa-Hali grad!

In reflecting upon my Professional Growth Plan that I established last year for 2013-14, I am pleasantly surprised that the plan that I created is slowly coming to fruition.  Perhaps it is wrong for me to admit that I am a bit 'surprised', but in my experience, things seem to come up that alter even the most concrete of plans. When I created this plan, I had been at my current school for seven years and was planning to be at that school for a few more years so that I could see my plan through.  That changed in the Spring of 2013, when I found out I would be moving to a new school in the fall of 2013.  And as much as I expected my Growth Plan to have to change significantly, with some slight re-adjustments it has remained remarkable constant through my move to a new school.

I am still very committed to designing and implementing a means to improve teacher and student achievement through a collaboratively-developed, inquiry-based model that is based in observing the pedagogical practices in a classroom. Rather, the biggest modifications to my growth plan have really been in terms of the time-frame and the methodology around executing my growth plan.  With respect to the methodology, in the past, I would have come into the school with a great deal more answers than questions:  I would have had my own vision for a school, and I would have tried to implement this vision in a deliberate and determined fashion that might have swept some people up, but likely would have alienated others.  I might have done this without getting to know people, without asking questions and actually listening to the answers, and without getting a sense of where people are and what their visions might be.  And while I might have been able to get some things accomplished, the efficacy of these items could be questionable at best.

In coming to my new school, I really wanted to immerse myself in the culture of the school and get to know my new staff.  I wanted to work along side of the staff to be a co-creator of what we want for our schools and for our graduates.  And I realize now that these are things that cannot be left to chance:  if you want to get to know a school you have to WANT to do it AND make deliberate efforts to do so.  As a result:

• I committed to making the time to meet with every one of my staff members so that I could get to know them and ask them where they wanted to go...where they wanted the school to go.  And it has been so worth it, not from an organizational perspective, but from a personal perspective:  I really like the people that I work with, and have enjoyed getting to know them.  
• I created an inquiry-based activity that allowed our staff to air concerns about and take ownership of staff meetings so that we could increase staff engagement, model different techniques to effectively engage their students in class discussions, continue to expose us to collaborative technologies that maximize engagement and interactions between participants and to get authentic staff input through asking more questions as opposed to providing answers.
• I facilitated the co-design and co-development of a professional development activity that allowed us to set the vision for our school 
• I led staff through activities that allowed us to co-create structures that enhance and ensure adult and student learning and we have designed and begun to implement a collaborative model that enables self-organized learning within a framework of defining guaranteed curricula and recognized struggle points.  

I did all of these so we could have a collective starting point for where it is that we want to go. And I did all of these because I want to be a co-learner, a co-creator, and a co-implementor.  

So, my goal continues to be the same, however, the work to get there has changed. And to this point, it has been both enjoyable and productive--US doing it TOGETHER.

Our staff creating our vision TOGETHER.