Do

Story Stroll: Literacy Project 2022-2023

The Story Stroll for the school year 2022-2023 was revealed on April 26th at our school and community Night of Excellence. Our elementary principal reflectively told me that our Story Stroll drew in lots of people in numbers they had not seen before for its interaction and collaboration to showcase to families. On May 22nd, eighth graders and first graders came together during their respective class periods and together completed the Story Stroll read and walk together, along with receiving their personal copies of the book they co-wrote together! It was a huge success. All four elementary teachers reflectively commented about the how fun this project was, and how happy they were with the collaboration between our two groups as "mentor" and "mentee" in the partnership of reading and social skills!

My action plan was valuable for organizing and gathering interviews and perspectives to make this project a success, along with giving me valuable insights into continuing this project and what it can offer the community going forward.

The stakeholders impacted during this year's project were: families of eighth and first graders, first graders, eighth graders, Dillon Public Library, UMWestern college education students and a couple professors, and families at large who will participate in the Story Stroll project as it moves around the community this summer and fall season.

This project pushed me into new leadership roles I had yet taken on in my district, and that was a fulfilling role to take on, while also took a lot of organization, communication, and hard work. Going forward, the Story Stroll project will continue, but in new formats each year, and with goals to continue analyzing what community groups and families would appreciate seeing to reflect their identities in the form of stories.

Figure 1 (below): The Story Stroll project in action as diverse groups come together in the form of reading literacy. These images demonstrate the success of multiple groups collaborating purposefully towards an end product and how new uses of technology to engage in literacy in the form of QR codes of recorded readings of the story. This project was meant to bring families in the community together, as demonstrated below, my leadership pathway choice for this project of Community, Awareness, Engagement, and Advocacy.

Capstone Action Plan

Capstone Project Action Plan

Briefly describe the priority need you selected as the basis for your Capstone Project Action Plan.

The Story Stroll project came out of a need for bringing the school and community together–providing an opportunity for what we do in the classroom to become a part of the daily life of our community. The Story Stroll project invites community members to get outside, to exercise/walk, enjoy nature, and to also enjoy a story along the way that was written and illustrated (and recorded) by our local students. The need was also inspired by the reality that what we do in school can be for the greater good outside of school. That writing and reading can also have other benefits when put in the format of a Story Stroll. I hope that it continues to inspire creativity and thinking of others/kindness.

Describe “what is” based on your needs assessment.

The Dillon community has never had a project like this put into place to build a bridge between community and school/students.

Identify Major Concerns

+Story Stroll project has multiple faucets to make it come to life, including fundraising/grant writing to support the project

+Communication between all parties in the collaboration group to make sure everyone is feeling prepared and fairly involved in the process from start to finish

+Time commitments from all parties in the collaboration group to successfully implement the project by April deadline

+Funding barriers: the Story Stroll project requires extra costs to produce this product for the community that is outside my normal classroom budget/school budget.

+Solutions: Grant writing for local support from organizations like the Art Council or United Way to help the funding of producing the Story Stroll

Decide Preliminary Priorities

+Initial meetings to plan project dates and timelines and goals

+Establish meetings and times to collaborate throughout the process of creating the Story Stroll project to make sure each element is on time and successful in implementation

Determine Needs Indicators

+No community and school collaborations

+New way to communicate and share with community what our local students are capable of and use that to bring the community together

+Advocate for literacy in a new way

+Bring parents and kids together outside of school in a new way

Identify Data Sources

+UMWestern collaboration with Katrina Kennett and her technology classes (1 in Fall 2020, 1 in Spring 2022) for supporting writing and recording process of Story Stroll project

+Dillon Public Library collaboration with Lori Roberts to help organize and share resources and time to put together the project for our community. Important collaborator for grant writing and supporting the making of this project.

+1st grade teachers and students as the audience of the story stroll project, but also the voices for the recording

+8th Art teacher and students as the illustrators of the story stroll pages to accompany the story for visual effects

List Allies

• Allies & Reasoning: UMWestern college support from local professor and education technology classes. This will support future teachers on chances to come into the classroom and see first-hand experience of incorporating technology into the classroom with elementary and middle school age students

• Dillon Public Library: support will create a project that is long-standing for the community, promotes literacy, family time, and exercise.

• Principal & Teachers: support will showcase student’s collaboration between grade levels in the form of literacy, art, technology, and broadcast a project that was created with the intent of bringing the community together

List Opponents

+No opponents came from this project proposal

Explain how you will grow your leadership skills for the selected pathway and the selected foundational competency.

Pathway:Leadership Pathway

Competency:Community, Awareness, Engagement, and Advocacy (See Figure 1 above)

Leadership growth will be achieved by:

The Story Stroll project was intended/created for building community connections. This leadership competency asks for a new way to advocate for students learning in new ways, identify what the community might benefit from to connect with students learning. This project is an advocate for student learning outside the classroom/bigger than themselves and for an audience that will directly see the impact of their work. This includes the 1st graders, middle schoolers, and college students.

I believe this project will move me from Emerging to Performing competency where the Story Stroll was an idea to bring community and student learning together, and because of the planning and interconnections with other community stakeholders, this allowed me to connect families interests and their kids with a project that bridges school and community together. I believe this project will allow me to move to a Performing Stage, where this project will strengthen the school and community connection, strengthen teaching relationships with other teachers and community partners for future collaborations.

Foundational competency:Collaborate Purposefully (See Figure 1 above)

Competency: Personal Effectiveness, Technological Facility

Leadership growth will be achieved by:

I believe the Story Stroll project, at its foundation, is meant to bring literacy to life for a community. Each of my students is a reflection of the community’s diversity, but in order to create a Story Stroll, I need the collaboration with many other community groups within and outside of the school to make it a success.

To collaborate purposefully I needed to work with different groups in the community to make the project a success. For this first Story Stroll pilot project, I had been working on involving different groups and collaborating with them to meet our self-created deadline of April 27th: UMWestern college, Dillon Public Library, 1st grade staff, art teacher, and administration. I have the hope of including our Spanish teacher/students in the future project. The project has been an ongoing self-education and reflective project so far.

The Story Stroll project required a few new tasks involving technology to produce this type of project. This project allowed me to emerge into a developing and performing stage from the emerging stage. Several meetings during this project were to engage in professional 1 on 1 collaborations to learn how to use Synth recording and QR codes applications to produce the project for an audio aspect to the project. This increased my knowledge of new technology to use for the future as well. We plan on demonstrating our use of these technologies in upcoming conferences for the library to show how we put this project together for our community.This project allowed me to use research and collaboration skills to learn the new technologies to apply to this project and to teach college and middle schoolers how to use it to bring the project the audio element we wanted. This aspect was appealing to several groups participating as it builds on verbal/speaking skills for those participating and helped stakeholders respond well to the project idea.

How and where do your selected foundational competency and your selected pathway intersect? (See Figure 2 below)

Using leadership to initiate a Story Stroll project for the community that would bring the community together with multiple parties involved to make the project possible. Build communication and trust with working partners to make the project worthwhile: organized, scheduled plans to meet goals/timeline dates. This project called for a lot of organization, research, collaboration, and communication. I feel all of these elements helped build on effective leadership skills to run a project that involved multiple parties, successfully. Keeping all participating groups involved, well-communicated, and prepared helped to guide participants in the project.

Figure 2 (below): The Story Stroll shows an intersection of my capstone pathways. Multiple ages of students and adults engage in literacy together. Purposeful collaboration over the course of a year brought this project together with diverse groups. Using technology in new ways to support engaging families in reading together as shown below, and effective communication between all groups to reach the end goal of putting this Story Stroll out in the Dillon community to be used as seen below for engaging reading time with others.

Figure 1 &2 (above and below): Collaborate Purposefully, Technology comes to life for literacy