LEADING/COORDINATING
PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP
Leadership is not a matter of title or position, but a matter of action. A true leader is one who empowers his/her followers to reach mutually desired goals.
Leaders build cultures where individuals connect and commit to one another as a team by:
- Focusing on relationships between employees, clients, and stakeholders.
- Empowering team members through voice in matters from daily operations to organizational mission.
Leaders instill purpose and meaning to the work by:
- Building individual and team belief that we are contributing to a larger purpose.
- Affirming that each team member’s work is significant to the purpose and success of the organization.
- Regularly acknowledging team member accomplishments.
Leaders cultivate growth by:
- Investing time and resources for individual and team development.
- Coaching individuals and teams to set and achieve goals.
Leaders execute. (maximize impact) by:
- Ensuring excellence of of products and services.
- Aiming beyond client satisfaction to securing client loyalty.
- Partnering with clients to develop strategic plans for initiative success.
- Measuring and reporting achievement of objectives and goals.
PARTNERING WITH DISTRICT LEADERS
ON-GOING PARTNERSHIP WITH DISTRICT LEADERS
An essential part of my role is collaboration with school leaders to create a vision and design a strategic plan for professional development.
Our Future Ready Coaching Cadre partnerships begin with vision-casting, strategic planning session with district and/or campus leaders, ESC Region 11 coaches, and myself. From there, I create a customized plan for the district. Through out the year, I communicate with district leaders and with ESC 11 coaches to resolve challenges, celebrate Wins, and adapt the plan as necessary.
DEMONSTRATING IMPact of Professional Learning
As a professional learning institution, ESC Region 11 is constantly working to demonstrate the impact of the services that we provide.
I am working as a part of the leadership team to identify strategies for measuring the impact of our work. The document, "Determining Impact: Exemplars" is report of strategies our team is using to measure our impact.
UROCKEDU VISION
Following a reorganization of the service center, our several employees from multiple departments were placed together to provide digital learning and future ready services to our districts. As coordinator of the group, I began work to form a team by facilitating team vision setting.
I facilitated hands-on, active strategies, through which we identified our shared foundational beliefs related to teaching, learning, coaching, and professional development. As a result of the process, we identified our overarching belief that to impact students learning, we would build the collective efficacy of cadres of teachers by celebrating and nurturing their work. From there, we named became "URockEDU" with the objective of helping teachers see that they are rockstars.
UROCKEDU TEAM GOALS
Our theme for 2018-19, tying in with the ESC Region 11 mission, is "Maximizing Impact." I led the team to set specific goals related to reaching more teachers, going deeper with the educators we currently coach, and growing deeper as a team.
Throughout the year, at our monthly work days, we evaluate our progress toward our goals.
CHARACTERISTICS OF A GREAT TEAM
As our URockEDU group grew, we added team members. To build the team I lead each member to create a pecha-kucha presentation that illustrated a characteristic of a great team. As a result of the presentations, we identified the characteristics that we wanted for the URockEDU team.
The week following, I sent out a survey asking the team members to rate our team on each of the characteristics we identified. A quick look over the survey results verified that our team was healthy. However, on closer inspection, I realized that at least one or two of the members of the team did not feel that we celebrate unique perspectives or that they were psychologically safe in our gatherings. This caused some serious self-reflection for me as the leader. My gut told me that our emphasis on shared team purpose might not be allowing for varied opinions.
At our next team meeting, we examined the survey results as a group. Through dialogue, we determined that prior to each meeting we would review and have open conversation about our progress at each work day.
