Design

Describe your action plan and how each of your four chosen competencies will influence its design and implementation.

The action plan in a nutshell was to create an implement relevant professional development throughtout the year for music teachers around Montana. With the help of the other members of Big Sky Kodály, we planed to create at least two main workshops throughout the year to start providing professional development. 

When executing the action plan of my Capstone, the pathway of Instructional Leadership and focusing on coaching and mentoring was at the forefront of the project. It was the main overarching goal when thinking about how to create and bring professional development to Montana music teachers. The whole goal of the project was to continue to help educators grow and connect them to other educators that might be a resource or a mentor for them down the road. I wanted to connect with as many music educators as possible and help them continue on their educational journey and help them if needed!

Communication was absolutely key to making this project a reality. To reach music teachers around the whole state, because Montana is so huge, took many different forms of communication. I wanted to try and reach as many music teachers as I possibly could, so I have had to be really creative in how I tried and communicated with teachers and get the word out about upcoming workshops. Social media, word of mouth, and email lists are just a few of the communication pathways I tried. In doing this, I had to come up with some creative ways to communicate with music teachers to try and reach more. 

Continued learning and education, like the coaching and mentoring, is at the heart of this project and it has really impacted the overall goal. I wanted to provide professional development for music teachers around the state and help teachers continue to grow as educators, which in turn will benefit the students. Picking different topics of interest and figuring out what the music teachers of Montana wanted to learn about helped in making this capstone a reality. 

Since Montana is such a large state and there are many different teaching sceanrios out there for Montana teachers, I wanted to explore and challenge inequity by providing professional development to all music teachers, no matter their teaching situation. In doing this, I had to get creative in the ways my team and I provide professional development so people can join even if they live hundreds of miles away. My team and I really wanted to push for online presence at all of our workshops and moving the workshops to different locations so there were opportunities for teachers who might not live close to the bigger cities where most professional development is located at. We wanted to give the opportunity to all music teachers in the state.  

Artificats #6 and #7 are my action plans and thoughts throughout the work of my Capstone project. 

How will your leadership leverage the strengths and address the needs of diverse stakeholders to support the action plan, develop capacity, broaden decision-making, and learn collaboratively?

With the leadership I have learned from TLI, I have worked with the Big Sky Kodály board and other Montana music teachers to develop and actively plan relevant professional development workshops for the music teachers of Montana. I made sure to express ideas and concerns I might have had and work with others as a team to create a plan for workshops. I knew that problems and questions would come up, but I was and still am confident in our skills as a board to work together and figure out what is best for the workshops we are planning. Below are email correspondences with the Big Sky Kodály board which gives a glimpse of what kinds of conversations we were are still are having to make our professional development workshops a success (Artifacts #8-#11).

How will you address obstacles that you may encounter in implementing your plan?

To tell if my action plan was successful will be to see increased attendance at professional development workshops in the future or if people return for another workshop. The evidence would just be seeing if we are reaching more Montana music educators with our workshops and to not only see the same people return, but see new people and have conversations about why they picked that specific workshop and continue learning about what music educators want to learn in the future. I also think it is important to continue to do surveys after the workshops so we can continue to serve the music teachers needs to the best of our abilities.