Part II

Connecting Self-Assessment to Context

Through my professional growth in leadership and my experience with TLI, I have realized that while I recognize bias, I have few. While they do not impede my ability to connect with others, I have accepted societal norms that are detrimental to other, less privileged groups. Becoming aware of one's bias is an important step in valuing all stakeholders, but taking the time to connect, listen, and explore other's view points is where growth can occur. Instead of becoming frustrated with outspoken educators who tend to take over staff meetings, I have made it my focus this year to understand concerns and examine their, and other opposing viewpoints.

Reflective Practices: I began in my journey as emerging. I acknowledge that I do a good job of reflecting on my own teaching and learning. I identify shortcomings, take responsibility, and work toward student growth, but I do not dedicate time to helping others grow through reflection. In addition I take advantage of leadership opportunities such as leading committees such as Ag Day and the district PLC Leadership team.

Interpersonal Effectiveness: I initially placed myself at performing because I work hard to put students at the center of our educational vision, but I quickly realized that there is more to it than saying that students are the center of the vision. We can all say that students should be the focus of every move we make, but setting aside previous experiences, personal bias, and reluctance to change in order to really put students at the center of teaching takes a shift in thinking. Because of this, I was late emerging when this process started for me.

Exploring and Challenging Inequities: I immediately placed myself at emerging. I know that inequities exist, but identifying those inequities was not obvious for me. A lot of inequities exist in education and I think those became especially obvious this school year. Some students have a lot of support at home and families that are really dedicated to their education, others have very well-meaning families but they became stretched so thin that school was no longer a priority. Through my TLI experience I realized that I could not let these students slip through the cracks. Tough conversations needed to happen in order to connect with those families and get them the help they needed to be successful learners. This required advocating for them with upper administration to get them technology or gift cards for food. Pushing myself out of my comfort zone and breaking down the typical teacher-student boundaries became necessary. In addition, I initiated conversations with colleagues that are performing in this competency and used their expertise and experience to grow in my own abilities to seek out equity for each student.

Facilitating Collaborative Relationships: Thanks to the PLC process I began my TLI journey at a developing stage, but realized that my PLC really needed a leader. Working with others has always come fairly easily for me, but many times I became so focused on my ideas or goals that I missed other perspectives. Opening my mind to other perspectives and visiting with other PLC groups has helped my own team with communication and optimization of our time together.

Connecting Assessment of Diverse Stakeholders to Context

The TLI process taught me that the field of education relies on collaboration, but effective collaboration is impossible without building positive relationships and communicating effectively. Sometimes information gained from an emailed survey is much less honest or beneficial than a lunch time conversation or after school chat with a parent. While on the other hand, sometimes anonymity is what stakeholders need in order to be really honest. (see below) Connecting with teacher friends, is much easier than reaching out to specialists or other teachers with firm mindsets. I quickly found out however that in order to complete my capstone I again had to reach out of my own comfort zone and seek out all view points. This journey has also taught me that opposing viewpoints are many times the most important. If everyone in a room always agrees, it is really hard to have growth.

Becoming more aware of differences that exist within my building along with conversations with my building administrator influenced the direction of my project. He indicated that he would like a way to connect students from year to year and ease the transition process for both students and teachers. Upon exploring how to do this I started talking to teachers and specialists as well as meeting with parents and students. I wanted all voices to be heard, while creating something that was easy for teachers to use and didn't create a situation where they formed biases about students before they met them. At the beginning of my journey I envisioned teachers having the greatest stake in my project, but it was the parents who really influenced the direction that I went.