This artifact was one of the assignments of the EDUC-623 Teacher Leadership and Professional Learning class that I took with Instructor Terry Hurlburt in the Spring of 2017. The course asked students to reflect on their roles as change agents in their schools and education in general. Students were expected throughout the course to self-reflect and self-assess their practices, plans, instruction, and growth with focus on strengths and improvement. This particular assignment asked students to video themselves teaching a lesson and then score themselves on the Teacher Performance Assessment Rubric. The InTASC Standard that this artifact aligns with is Standard 10, Leadership and Collaboration, because it provided me with the opportunity to reflect on my classroom leadership and my work towards building and maintaining a collaborative atmosphere in my classes.

Although it is always difficult to watch yourself on video, it is actually one of the most powerful ways to reflect on your instruction. This process, along with the specific rubric really helped me to focus on the individual components that go together to make a successful teaching (and learning) experience. I thought this deep reflection was a great way to help students focus on our personal strengths and weaknesses in our teaching. That way, we are able to identify what we want to continue to foster and what we need to focus on to grow in our profession. I would say that, in reflecting on the rubric, an area of strength is my classroom management. I am good about establishing clear, yet high expectations of my students, quite often developed with their insight as well. Students tend to rise to the expectation, so it is important not to set the bar too low. Another area of strength is my professional growth. I have actively sought out professional learning throughout my career, but even more so now that I am an instructional coach. I am constantly collaborating with teachers individually and in teams to implement district initiatives effectively as well as reflecting on and improving our practice. Reflection has become an invaluable tool to improve my own learning as well as helping others to work towards their learning goals. An area that I can never score myself as exemplary is planning and instruction. I have a tough time saying my work is exemplary when I know there are constantly ways for me to be better. I do a good job for the most part on making sure that learning targets and outcomes are directly aligned to core standards, but it is a constant battle to make sure that those targets and outcomes are adequately communicated for students and that they find independent ownership in the learning as well.

I felt that this was a good opportunity for me to reflect on my own teaching and it honestly made me value the work that our principal has to do in evaluating staff. It is tough when the evidence you are looking for is not clearly evident from the observation or video you are using. There is so much more to it than simply making marks on a rubric. It also has motivated me to dig deeper this summer into lesson planning methods, strategies, and templates. I think that there is no magic bullet, but that if we surround ourselves with the most useful tools possible and build more options into our plans, we are moving in the right direction.

This artifact is the Gallup’s Strengthsfinder 2.0 results from the book Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rath, which was based on the work of Don Clifton. The book was a deep-dive into the importance of learning and capitalizing on your personal leadership skills as well as learning the skills in others that complement your own skills. The course that this artifact came from was EDUC-623 Teacher Leadership Professional Learning with Terry Hurlburt which I took in the Spring of 2017. The purpose of completing the Strengthsfinder 2.0 was to make students aware of their specific areas of leadership strengths so they could capitalized on those strengths in their leadership positions. The survey results were sometimes surprising and often helped students become aware of underutilized strengths or areas that were perceived as strengths but really weren’t. The InTASC Standard that this artifact aligns with is Standard 10, Leadership and Collaboration, because it provided me with understanding and self-knowledge to help improve my impact as a leader on students and fellow teachers.

Before going into the assessment, I pretty much could have guessed that Achiever and Responsibility would be 2 of my themes. To me they are very similar and tend to play well with each other in the Executing domain. These 2 themes can be great strengths and let people know that they can rely on me to do what needs to be done to help them and hopefully lead them, but it can become a double-edged sword when people start to take advantage of those traits or rely too heavily on them. The Relator theme was a bit of a surprise to me. I was painfully shy when I was younger and have had to work constantly on building my communication and people skills. I have worked hard to improve through the years, and my position as an instructional coach has forced me to work even more outside of my comfort zone. I was actually pretty excited that I even had a strength show up in the Relationship Building Domain. Because I knew that area had been a relatively weak area for me historically, I have made it a focus to build relationships with my staff so that they feel more comfortable working with me on improving our student learning. It was affirming to know my work had paid off.

I think being made aware of my leadership strengths has helped me to better understand how I influence others, both staff and students. It has also helped me in my personal life to understand how I deal with daily decisions and obstacles. Hopefully, this knowledge will help me better utilize my skills to help both students and staff grow in their learning.

This artifact was a self-assessment after reading a section in the book How to Thrive as a Teacher Leader by John G. Gabriel in which students were asked to rate themselves 1 to 10 for each leadership quality listed, and then explain improvement needed or current strengths that support that score. This artifact was drawn from the course Advancing Minds: How to Thrive as a Teacher leader which was taught by Stacie Giesecke through AEA PD online in the summer of 2017. The idea behind the assignment was that in order to be an effective leader, you need to understand the skills required to excel as well as know your personal strengths and areas where improvement is necessary to be the most effective leader. The InTASC Standard that this artifact aligns with is Standard 10, Leadership and Collaboration, because it helped me to understand not only my areas of leadership strength, but also areas I needed to improve to best support my staff and students.

I enjoyed looking at my strengths for this assignment, but my favorite part was actually forcing myself to sit down and look ways that I can make improvements. I find that I often get comfortable with things that come easily to me or that just feel more natural. It is easy to get in a rut when things become too comfortable, so it was good for me to look at ways to improve even my biggest strengths. For example, it was eye-opening for me as I reflected on being resourceful as one of my biggest strengths, but then realized that I sometimes work too hard to make things work with the materials I have, when I sometimes need to ask for resources to make them work better. Another example is under the fairness and accepting categories, I realized that I naturally spend more time working with teachers that are openly receptive to coaching cycles, but I need to do a better job of including, and maybe even recruiting, teachers that are less receptive. This self-assessment has been good for me to re-evaluate my strengths as a coach and given me specific areas that I can focus on for improvement. Hopefully, by working at improving those areas, I can better impact my staff and students.