Design

DESIGN

Plan of action and how each of the four chosen competencies will influence its design and implementation.

Stakeholders were first surveyed to gather data on what meaningful professional learning opportunities should be offered. Based on personal observations, communication with district leadership, and the survey it was decided that a cadre of veteran teachers would be established. The ELA Cadre year would be broken into two parts, The first part will be structured into explore, goal setting, and then learning towards the goal. Second part is building professional learning opportunities based on the group goal.

• Adult Learning
• Goal: Support lead teachers to become knowledgeable and confident to teach others in their area of expertise.
• Goal: Create sustainability by allowing teachers autonomy in their learning as they teach others and become leaders.

Adult learning will influence the design of the ELA Cadre as teachers will learn throughout the year before they share their learnings with others. Allowing for both learning and autonomy will be challenging, but the shared group goals will allow for collective learning and focused growth goals. (Evidence D)

Continuing Learning and Education

• Goal: Support my district’s academic goals through the continuation of professional development that supports educators as they learn and grow towards a common goal.
• Goal: Provide lead teachers with the necessary tools to provide professional learning opportunities to their peers.

Continuing learning and education is a critical competency in the action plan as the design of learning opportunities has a goal of building opportunities for professional learning where the lead teachers are the presenters. This ties in with the other competencies as there will be promoting, learning, and collaboration of these lead teacher teams. (Evidence B)

Collaborate Purposefully

• Goal: Support regular opportunities for stakeholders of all cultures to contribute their knowledge, skills, and perspectives in a variety of ways as cadre's share their learnings with colleagues.

Collaborate purposefully was a focus during the communication with stakeholders (Evidence A). This competency will prove to be a challenge until I can increase the amount of applicants for ELA Cadre. With limited applicants it will be difficult to represent and build communication amongst a diverse network.

Instructional Leadership Competencies

• Goal: Bring together diverse perspectives through the development of teacher leadership teams
• Goal: Reflect on my own leadership skills in order to impact others to build stronger collaborative leadership groups

Another critical competency, Instructional Leadership allows provides the creation of a system to foster the development of other lead teachers. My work includes the time, motivation, and platform of this team development. One avenue of both time and motivation is offering the adult learning for salary advancement credit. This way the learning semester can be applied for credit. The platform is again offering the lead teacher course for credit to other teachers. The challenge is listing course expectations and making homework meaningful towards the group learning goal and not creating busy work for participants. In addition it must be specified and evidence document that participants are working during their credit time. (Evidence C)

Evidence C: Developing a time line, expected content, expectations, and plans of building capacity through collaboration with stakeholders.

Evidence D : Implementing adult-learning strategies while utilizing colleagues' diverse areas of expertise.