When I re-enrolled in the Michigan State Master of Arts in Education program (MAED), the ability to pick two concentrations to focus on as part of the degree helped me to obtain the knowledge I needed for both possible avenues I could pursue with the degree. My degree has focuses in Sport Coaching and Leadership and P-12 Leadership. In this showcase, you will see work displayed from both disciplines, as I feel this best encapsulates my experience within the graduate program and shows that I have gained valuable knowledge in both the realms of sport leadership and in school leadership.
Coaching
Developmental Asset Scorecard
Currently I coach high school sports, so when I saw that there were classes around positive youth development using sport, I jumped on the opportunity to take them. Part of the first project of one of these classes was to create a scorecard and analyze the program we currently coach in based on the assets that we view as important to development. The scorecard is in table form, midway down the page. This scorecard helped me to realize what I think is important in coaching, and employed skill of being introspective to refine and analyze what I view as my "best practices". Using the developmental asset framework as a guide for assets we feel are important in positive youth development to build more well-rounded young people using sports as a way to do so was one of the pillars of this project and is something I still use in my coaching and teaching context today.
Fixing The Numbers
One of the biggest issues that youth sport faces today is a lack of participation. This assignment was unique because it tasked us with looking at the big picture of the issue and how the issue presents itself in my specific situation, and how I think the issue can be solved on a macro and micro level. Through this, I demonstrated critical thinking and problem-solving skills to look at a relevant issue in my field. This forced me to look inward at my own situation within my coaching context and got me to think of new ideas to increase participation in the sports that I coach.
Chipping In
Skill-building in an athletic context was the focus of one of my kinesiology courses. In this video, which was the end of a larger project, I had to teach an athlete a new skill within a sport they were familiar with. The biggest point in this for me was that although there are many different ways to "skin a cat", all of those ways must still be taught and re-enforced even though the target skill can remain the same.
Putting it all Together
Lastly, this is a snippet from a larger project on practice organization right down to the drill-work and rationalizing each component of a drill that is tailored to teaching athletes new skills. I put all of my learned skills on display here in using what I have learned in this class and in the KIN program to put together plans that I use in practices today. My biggest takeaway from this was that greater learning takes place when you broaden the scope of what is taught and how it is conveyed- that is, teaching a skill in a few different ways allows the learner to be more flexible in how they digest and interpret the information and how they can convey some sort of understanding or mastery through their actions in learning the skill.
School Leadership
Relieving Tensions
As part of the Leadership and Organizational Development class I took, we were encouraged to look inward at whichever organization we were working with (in my case, the school at which I work) to look introspectively at tensions that could possibly be disrupting progress. In this artifact, called the CVF Tensions Worksheet, I analyzed workplace disconnects with regards to new initiatives and possible solutions to bring different factions of teachers back together and took a look into my own context as to how I can be a leader in the workplace. The skill I displayed in this was to critically analyze and attempt to solve an issue through putting myself in others' shoes to gain perspectives on ideas I may disagree with.
How do we Learn?
In becoming an administrator, learning how to do educational-based research is critical, especially in order to understand the different contexts in which people live and learn. Learning about the different contexts and research methods was key in developing my understanding into understanding research techniques as a way to explain behaviors and learning styles, and was my biggest takeaway not just from this unit, but through the class as a whole. As a demonstrated skill, I believe that showing this deeper understanding of learning styles and how outside forces help and hinder learning is the biggest things I learned to do and employ in my classroom today. This slideshow was the final project for the class in which we analyzed our preferred ethnographic research styles and how we can use that to serve our students better.
How's Everyone Feeling?
Further on the leadership track, we had to look at something we viewed as a problem within the teaching staff of our building. We were working on implementing a new behavioral system and people were all over the place with how they felt about the new system and how they were enforcing it. This project analyzed the root causes of the rift in feelings, took into account all stakeholders' perspectives, and offered solutions to get people back on the same page. Through this, I showed that it definitely takes a village to enact change such as this, and that you don't need to have everyone in sync but sometimes leadership involves making decisions that are going to make the least people upset (because you're never really going to please everyone).
Leading by Fixing
Being that my end-goal is to become an athletic director, I feel that this case-study analysis does well to encapsulate my thoughts for the issue of fixing athletic programs' issues when suffering from prior poor leadership, especially when the problems stem from a school-level and is not necessarily directly related to athletics. The skill I displayed here is using data to support a solution; something entirely different from what is on the rest of this portfolio. I've never had the chance to do this but I learned that a lot of problems are deeper than they appear when it comes to athletic leadership; most times issues such as the one I was presented with require wholesale changes to leadership to be effective and learning how to do that and what true change looks like was a big takeaway I had.