Educational Leadership Projects

Resources

• Change Management Resources (by Prosci)

In Progress

• Dingle Instructional & School Culture Scorecard / Community Guide:  Create a rubric/plan that charts Dingle’s path and progress to becoming a Master School for shared understanding and opportunities to celebrate small and major steps; create it with all stakeholders. 

• Parent and Scholar Dashboards by PTA:  Create awareness of student and parent experiences much earlier so that the community can resolve issues more quickly.

Under Consideration

• Staff Awards and Recognition Program: Project Charter (limited access)  Identify where in the growth chart PTA can award and recognize staff (no money awards) to support progress and identify the types of awards and recognition PTA should do.  For example. an all-staff lunch when the whole school meets a specific milestone, then parents in PTA fill in the details.  

• Re-Use Compact ('Pact') from Exemplar Schools: Project Page (public access).  Replace Dingle’s parent-teacher-district pact with an exemplar version

Not Started

1. Teacher Experience: A better way to understand and advocate for the teacher experience.  Are they blocked unnecessarily?  Are there things the community can do?  This is diving into the components of the "Five Keys" school performance chart.

2. Increase ASES Tutoring Time:  For the 2021-2022 academic year WJUSD set a target of at least 1 hour of daily tutoring per scholar in ASES daily (2:30-2:55 reading time, 3:35-4:25 homework time).  The current status and staffing bandwidth is unknown.  A community member who had run a volunteer tutoring program in another community has recommended starting one at Dingle.  Dingle ASES is open to volunteer tutors as well.  How this would work and Dingle Community PTA's role needs clarification.

3. Amplify the Culture (Dingle PTA Brand Guide):  Create a brand guide (language, colors, etc.) for Dingle PTA to follow on it's communications (website, newsletter, etc.) that amplifies Dingle's 'exemplar' culture.  Help Dingle school, too, where asked.  (Update 1/30/22.  This is the "Learning First" campaign, not yet officially started.)

4. Forever High Expectations: Create a formula to tie school expectations to exemplar schools.  

5. Campaign to Raise the Public's Understanding of Education in Woodland: take all that we have learned, communicate it to Woodland, and bring along more people to help make a difference in our schools in effective ways

6. Map Specific Colleges and Careers to State Standardized Scores:  It is difficult to map the "Smarter Balanced" measures used to assess Dingle's (and all CA schools') academic performance to your child's future.  For example, it appears that 'green' indicates right below or just at the minimum standard met; that is not good enough for scholars and families aiming for university or a high-skill trade.  This project is to better understand the state measures and give targets for specific life goals.

7. Effortless Parent Experience:  To foster positive relationships, confidence, and support from parents, read the book "The Effortless Experience" by Dixon, Toman, and Delisi and transform.  In one simple example, when a parent says, "I'm concerned my child isn't learning", what would a good outcome of that conversation look like and what should staff say?  What happens when the conversation isn't "effortless"?  The book makes the case for why 'effortless' is worthwhile and how to do it.

8. Keep Great Teachers: When we lose good teachers it sets our students and our efforts back.  Why do good teachers leave?  How do we keep them?  This is a big topic with a lot to learn.  We are looking for practical solutions to keep good teachers that want to stay with Dingle.

9. Education Excellence, Independent Auditor/Assessor: Something like the CA State Auditor (https://www.auditor.ca.gov/aboutus), but on Woodland education.  In particular to the work of assessing schools - and their support systems - for the SPSA.

10. Reporting Realtime Parent and Scholar Feedback:  What are the best practices?  The Garden Grove Unified School District uses the STOPit app (https://ggusd.us/stopit) for anonymous reporting.

Completed

• 2022-2023: Parent Coaching Experiment:  Given low Dingle parent attendance at the Project PROMESA and Project to Inspire engagement programs, this experiment is bringing the best of the "notebooks and conferences at home" experiment from the 1st trimester 2022-2023 to ELOP early morning drop off.  The goal is to see if this time, location, and content increase high effect parent engagement.

• 2022-2023: Leadership and Coach Notebooks at Home (scholar led conferences at home experiment in the 1st trimester)

• 2022-2023: Self-Reported Grades Online (experiment, view reports)

• 2021-2022: Parent Survey 2022 (end of year)

• 2021-2022: Scholar Recognition Pilot for Sight Words (K-2 grades):  Connecting data driven instruction (key 3 component) and student culture (key 2 component).  Vicki Keith organized the PTA side of this project (student awards) and teachers lead the data driven instruction side (defining sight words).  Vicki collected data to see the effect of the pilot which will ran for the entire 2021-2022 academic year.  It expanded into an on-going program and added math facts in 2022-2023.