Positive Learning Collaborative explanation and reflection:
School vision, mission and improvement implementation is a huge task to take on as a leader. I feel that this ISLLC Standard guides all other standards of success in a school system or specific school. From the beginning of my internship, I was asked to not only be involved with our schools mission and vision, but to be a school leader on the Positive Learning Collaborative for our school. Starting the end of the 2018-2019 school year, our school was in crisis. We had multiple student issues, a loss of communication between faculty, students and administration, and a lack of community involvement within our school. My mentor and principal took ownership of this issue, and called our district office to come up with appropriate programs and systems that we could put in place to help resolve these crisis issues. I was asked along with 5 other leaders in our building to help implement the PLC movement into our building culture. Therefore, I feel that this vision and change of school community over the past year and a half has to fall into ISLLC Standard 1.0 and creating and implementing a vision for our school community.
At the beginning of this process, I was sent along with my 5 other colleagues and administration to a training in TCIS. It first started with a four-day certification course for Therapeutic Crisis Intervention for Schools. There, I learned classroom consultation to assist other faculty members in the implementation of therapeutic crisis intervention, positive behavior interventions, and support as well as learning social- emotional learning skills, and restorative practices. The entire reason behind our mission was to promote the development of higher-level thinking, oral communication, self-management, and leadership skills. We also came together to find ways to promote student-faculty interaction. Overall, as a leadership team, we brought back TCIS training to our school faculty and worked together weekly to develop a vision, articulate that vision to our staff, and then implement it starting September 2019. We also planned activities that gave students the opportunity to work and collaborate together to learn and grow from each other.
I have learned through the theories taught in graduate level courses and through actual hands on practice that an improvement in school culture and student ownership is of utmost importance. Therefore, coming up with a plan to teach our faculty about PLC was first. We wanted to involve them in the process because I have learned that true leadership takes a team. If we involve faculty in the decision making, they will ultimately feel more positive about the initial change and feel a sense of ownership in the vision.
Our work with this consisted of getting our staff and faculty on board with the process, and getting the entire school community to use the same language about behavior, enabling us to then establish an internal system that supports teachers and students. After we created a Professional development for our faculty, we created our own school-wide matrix/language that teachers could learn and then instill in their teaching to the students.
Our matrix was a living document and was altered as we went through the school year. When we found certain measures were being met by the students and teachers felt issues in the past were no longer things to call attention to, we quickly met as a leadership team to alter and add to our expectations of the students. Overall, the PLC helped our students and faculty collaborate and speak in the same language throughout the school so that students knew what was expected of them and how they could take ownership of their own actions and their education.
The amount of time I spent in training, professional development, implementation in a common goal, and stewarding a vision within my school truly showed me how much work it takes to create a vision and work towards a unified system. I feel that our work with this is a living document and will always need to be altered and revisited. I feel that great leadership does in fact revisit and adjust as time goes on. It is important to always remember what your goal, vision, and mission are and that is why I feel that the Positive Learning Collaborative that I had the opportunity to work on within my building is a true example of ISLLC Standard 1.0.
