Context

Greetings! My name is Katie Miller and I am a middle school language arts and reading teacher at Dillon Middle School in Dillon, MT. I am currently in my 12th year of teaching--all twelve years have been with 7th and 8th graders. I first arrived in Montana for my undergrad and master's degree in Missoula, MT before starting my teaching profession in Dillon.

Dillon is a rural community unique in the fact that it is home to UM Western college, well-known for its education program. The university brings a fluctuating college population to our rural town. Dillon is home to two school districts: Beaverhead High School district which serves our 9-12 students and our own Parkview Elementary school district which includes all K-8 students. The Dillon Middle School serves approximately 250 students.

I have been a member of our local BEA union and MFPE since becoming a school teacher, and in 2018-2020 became co-president of our local BEA. Our goal as a duo was to help our union reorganize to improve membership participation and become a stronger union as a school. The process of strengthening a union is a long-term goal that we continue to work on.

Instructional Leadership Competency: Community, Awareness, Engagement, and Advocacy

Part C

The Story Stroll Project: Coming into my twelfth year of teaching I am much more aware of how I might connect my students with our community. As a smaller community, I was inspired by bigger communities and libraries that invested in putting up their own story strolls based on published, well-known authors in the literacy world. However, to fulfill a need to give our community and our students something that was "ours" I wanted this project to be more than just a re-created book by a well-known author. I wanted my students, our their parents and our community members, to be able to stroll around with families and engage in reading a story completely made by our own local youth FOR the benefit of their families to enjoy. I began this project at an emerging level, not really having ever engaged in a project of this magnitude and believe that a year later I am at the least at the performing level of this competency. This project has allowed me to facilitate collaborations with our local library and UMWestern college education/technology students/professors; as well as building stronger relationships with the elementary first grade teachers and students. This project has allowed me to improve our community and inspire our community with a reading stroll written, illustrated, and recorded by our local youth. This project has been so successful that we will continue to make it each year, a new story to be shared in the community. I hope this project continues to reflect our community's interests, history, and diversity each year as it unfolds in new ways with new students.

Overarching Competency #1

Continuing Learning & Education: Part A

1. What are the implications for future leadership development from your self-assessment and analysis of this competency? I have always been an avid learner in regards to continuing my own professional growth for what I teach in the classroom, but this year I wanted to take on a project that would help my growth in relation to the community I serve in Dillon. By initiating a creating of a Story Stroll project that collaborates with our local Dillon Public Library, our UM Western technology classes, our 1st grade classrooms, our Art classrooms, and my language arts classrooms, I knew I would have much to learn about how my professional learning could expand to new horizons when I became involved with many community stakeholders.

2. At what stage are you now and what final stage is your goal?

I would say for most of my twelve years as a teacher I have been in fluctuating stages of this competency. I would say for most of teaching career, I am in the developing stage of the continuing learning competency. When I was involved with co-teaching workshops to my colleagues with UM Western I was in the performing/transforming stage for that year. I believe with the undertaking of the Story Stroll project this year that this will push me into the performing/transforming stage once again as my goal for this project is to bring families to our school of behalf of our collaborative project and to involve many in showcasing our students work, but also what we can do as teachers for our community.

3. Identify potential roadblocks to your teacher leadership related to this competency.

The Story Stroll project is a year-long project, and this means that this competency something I will continue to experience growth from month to month as I take on new elements of the project. Collaboration time with all parties included in making this project a success is a balance of communication, planning, and determination/hard work to bring all the pieces together for our end date in April 2022.

Part B:

1. Identify and describe the resources you regularly access or to which you contribute in your own personal continuing learning and education. My professional development learning is often directly related to content I want to teach in the classroom. I often use Yad Vashem for Holocaust studies, MEA-MFT conferences for a variety of professional learning, OPI for IEFA learning. This coming summer I hope to complete training at Heart Mountain for Japanese Internment Camps studies.

2. Include your habits, methods, and frequency of interactions with others about continuing learning and education. I enjoy learning. I try to take-on professional learning in the form of webinars, zoom meetings, face-to-face opportunities whenever I can; both during the school year and in my summers. I often interact with my own staff colleagues (mostly within my department), but what I enjoy is the connections I have made with teachers from around the country because of traveling/over-seas professional development I have had (mostly through Yad Vashem).

3. Describe continuing learning and education opportunities you have designed for adult learners. This year's Story Stroll project has been a project that is designed to bring in families/the community to see what our students can do when working together. In 2015-16 school year I was part of the Professional Development committee and we worked with UM Western to jointly teach workshops to our staff in the elementary/middle school. My language arts colleagues and myself led two workshops on bringing writing across the curriculum in the form of expository writing. It was so important and powerful to see our students learning writing in all classes in the same way. Our school needs improvement on keeping up on programs like this.

4. Identify potential personal growth areas, taking into consideration your own biases, experiences of privilege, and personal values. I believe this area is one I am always going back and forth on the scale of growth, usually from developing to performing and occasionally transforming.

5. Describe a continuing learning and education opportunity that you participated in or observed in your context. I was a workshop presenter with my two other language arts colleagues to lead writing across curriculum to elementary and middle school teachers.

Overarching Competency #2

Technological Facilities:

1. What are the implications for future leadership development from your self-assessment and analysis of this competency? I believe this one of my most frightening competencies to overcome in our modern society. I find technology to be constantly changing and trying to keep up on ways to incorporate technology in relevant ways to your classroom, but also in a way to communicate in our world can be overwhelming. It is often easier to hold on to (in regards to language arts) writing with paper and pencil, or just typing a google document and not trying to go beyond what you know. This competency requires me to think beyond the classroom is some ways to experience growth. In taking on my year-long project for our community Story Stroll, I wanted to use technology in a new way that involved my classroom teaching but also used technology to connect families and our community to what we were doing in the classroom.

2. At what stage are you now and what final stage is your goal?

I would consider myself at the emerging stage for this competency. My hope is that by using technology as one factor to connect our work in the classroom with our Story Stroll project that brings families in connection with our writing/work to lead me into a developing/performing stage with technology. One goal is to create QR codes of our 1st and 8th grades recording the story aloud to be posted on each story block so that families participating in the story stroll at any time in our community can hear the voices behind the writing. We hope to use our Google Slides final draft of the story to publish on our school website for families to enjoy. My hope is to use our Story Stroll project as a presentation for staff for what we can do with technology to connect families with our classrooms.

3. Identify potential roadblocks to your teacher leadership related to this competency.

Potential roadblocks would be the learning curve behind using new technology, such as Synth recording apps, QR codes, conversions to Google Slide documents, and likely more unseen technologies I will be working with in this project.

Part B:

1. Explain your current use of technology tools to do each of the following:

• Communicate with others: Mostly email, google shared drives, texting, zoom, webinars

• Manage professional responsibilities: google drive, shared calendars, email, gmail folders for organizing committees/emails.

• Collaborate with others. Google shared drive, email, webinars/zoom

2. Indicate with which pathways (instructional, policy, association) each technology tool is most often used. Instructional

3. Describe the advantages of using each technology tool. Google shared drives are a great resource for collaboration; webinars and zoom work well for meeting with colleagues around the state (and nation) for professional learning.

4. Describe the disadvantages of using each technology tool. Even in the age of COVID-19, zoom meetings and webinars do provide valuable access to collaboration, but I have to say face-to-face can be very valuable for collaborations within our school.

Overarching Competency #3: Personal Effectiveness

1. What are the implications for future leadership development from your self-assessment and analysis of this competency? I think personal growth in personal effectiveness is a competency you can always find yourself learning something new. I believe that by pushing myself to take on leadership projects like the Story Stroll (or the mentorship committee I am leading) will teach me new things on running a meeting, working with new people and a constant give and take collaboration so that everyone who is a part of the group has a say in the vision/direction of the project/work to come.

2. At what stage are you now and what final stage is your goal? I would say I am at a developing level for this competency and hope to fluctuate between performing/transforming during the projects I am leading this year.

3. Identify potential roadblocks to your teacher leadership related to this competency.There can always be times of conflict when it comes to ideas on a shared plan, however I feel like the Story Stroll project I have been working on have had less roadblocks so far, and a lot of support and effective communication. The scheduling and pacing of the project take a lot of communication and outside of school meetings which can be seen as a roadblock in a way.

Part B

1. Describe a time in your life when you were involved in a project or activity with others where your strengths were recognized and leveraged with special focus on one or more of the following:

• A specific incident in which you developed skills supporting your work with colleagues. The Story Stroll project I am undertaking this year has help me develop communication skills, collaboration skills and planning skills. A project that involves so many parties of individuals takes planning and a group that listens and supports one another.

• An opportunity or experience you sought to extend support to colleagues?

2. What impact did this experience have on your ability to do your best work and contribute to the project? The Story Stroll project so far has felt like a big endeavor and project to conquer within and without the classroom, but at the same time so rewarding to think about the end result we are working towards and the cool things happening as we have developed this project since September 2021.

3. How was this work influenced by culture and personal life experiences? The idea for this project came about from seeing another library in Flathead Lake putting together a story stroll for their community. Upon seeing this, I was inspired to bring a Story Stroll to our community of Dillon, but with our students being the writers and illustrators behind the writing. I felt that it would truly enrich our community if it was written by our own students

4. Describe barriers that you confronted. Planning, scheduling. These are the biggest obstacles for planning a project like this. Organization and starting this project in September and having an end goal of April gives a lot of time for development of this project with allowing all the pieces (artwork, writing the story, publishing, recording) to happen. This project also requires funding. In order to create a Story Stroll, we presented before two local organizations: Friends of the Library Association and United Way to help fund multiple elements of our project: the printing of the signs themselves, 180 copies of the books the students wrote, and materials for the debut at the Night of Excellence at my school on April 26th that had maker-table stations related to the main characters of our stories.