About Me
The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it's to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they're valued.
- Ken Robinson
What I will bring as a leader?
As an evolving educator and leader, I look for ways to strengthen school climate, teacher learning, student experience and learning, and community involvement. I add to my own learning and leadership by investing in my school in large and small ways. In the past school year, I exemplified my abilities to lead in various ways including:
- serving on the Back-to-School Fair volunteer committee at a district level
- built effective discipline practices, ensuring solid relationships with students and parents
- created and designed professional development sessions for book studies/Twitter Chats for our entire staff; #mhsabc
- attended professional development at TASSP and AVID leadership training
- developed multiple sessions of social-emotional-learning (SEL) student-focused tutorial programs that are/will be implemented with the entire student body
- worked with developing teachers, such as training first-year science teachers and mentoring a student teacher
- integrate technology as a tool to communicate with creativity and purpose
As an administrator, I will:
Support and develop effective discipline and classroom management practices, ensuring solid relationships between teachers, students and parents and safety within the school
Support the development of teachers through PLCs and professional development, helping put student experience and learning first
Build consensus and willingness to shift from WHAT to HOW we "do school"
Be a match in personality and drive
- exhibit my even temperament with joy and passion for everything I do
- develop and grow myself, the program, and the people involved
- implement learning frameworks based on best educational practices
- support effective programs initiatives and be willing to guide change
Cultivate positive culture and climate within the school
Exemplify and apply my strong educational practice
- Teacher of the Year finalist in MS and HS
- invited to train first-year science teachers for LISD in 2016
- PBL practitioner and participant in 2-year grant for Teacher Excellence
- recipient of LEF Dr. Jerry Roy Fellowship
Leadership Philosophy
Authentic leaders cultivate a unique self-reflective perspective and recognize this process is true for many of those with whom they interact. Reflection on how to honor these differences and successfully blend multiple viewpoints requires leaders to take responsibility for creating respectful discourse and fostering trust.
Administrators who build trust form a solid foundation for the whole system, creating the potential for connections and learning to happen at all levels. Leaders facilitate interpersonal connections by showing patience, enthusiasm, wisdom and supporting the hopes and visions of the many, yet still making room for the individual.
Hope and positivity grown through a leader’s focus on authenticity not perfection, integrity not pacification, and growth not complacency help knit together a strong educational community in which staff and students value innovation, skills, and most important, relationships that last a lifetime.
School systems should base their curriculum not on the idea of separate subjects, but on the much more fertile idea of disciplines... which makes possible a fluid and dynamic curriculum that is interdisciplinary.
- Ken Robinson
“Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations…unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn.”
- Peter Senge
As educators, we are only as effective as what we know. If we have no working knowledge of what students studied in previous years, how can we build on their learning? If we have no insight into the curriculum in later grades, how can we prepare learners for future classes?
- Heidi Hayes Jacobs
When teachers stop learning, so do students.
- Jim Knight
all text and artwork copyright C. Croll 2017