ISLLC Standard 1.0: Candidates who complete the program are educational leaders who have knowledge and ability to promote the success of all students by facilitating the development, articulation, implementation, and stewardship of a school or district.

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.

Summer Reading Program explanation and reflection:

The summer reading program was a vision that I worked on along with the literacy coach and Assistant Principal of Language Arts in order to establish a common vision and goal for our sixth through eighth grade students. The artifacts below fall into ISLLC Standard 1.0 due to their common vision for learning and the articulation and time that was spent on developing our vision, implementing the vision, and then stewarding it to our faculty and staff.

As we began speaking about a summer reading program, we took a look at the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade unit 1 curriculum. We came up with the idea that students should read novels over the summer, that could relate to their incoming curriculum to get them a head start on future units of student. We felt that by establishing a summer goal and topic, students would then come into that grade with a vision of what to expect and the topics would be easier for them to discuss and articulate throughout their first 2 months of schooling.

I had the opportunity to research grade level novels, proof and read them for accuracy, theme, and appropriateness, and then articulating the themes and visions to our grade level language arts teachers. The literacy coach, assistant principal, and myself wanted to get feedback from our faculty first before moving forward with the novel choices and activities. We felt it was important to establish a team wide consensus first so that our faculty felt a sense of ownership in this process.

After novels were chosen, I had the job of coming up with activities and work that students would complete over the summer as well. I also created grade level letter to send home to our students and parents so that they understood the summer tasks and activities. After all of this, our principal had to approve the work and novels, so I organized a meeting explaining our vision, mission, and ultimate goal of our summer reading project. I then came up with the idea to keep our summer reading novels alive by starting a monthly Language Arts initiative to do every first Monday or Tuesday of the month. The powerpoint that I created consisted of 2 quotations from 3 of the selected summer reading novels. The students would selection one quote each month to respond to. I provided teachers with graphic organizers that they gave to their students to respond on, and then we hung student responses throughout the school in order to establish a common vision on each of our floors. It was a fun initiative and students seemed to enjoy reading and hanging up their responses throughout the school for all to see.

I feel that these artifacts below falls into ISLLC Standard 1.0 due to the amount of time it took to develop, articulate, and implement this summer vision. We stuck to time lines and common themes and ultimately reviewed the grade level curriculums to make sure these novels also pertained to our school -wode unit one goals and themes as well. It was a great task to read, review and implement this to our staff and students, and I feel by completing this task, I was able to grow my skills as a leader.