My Favorite Passion

My favorite of the nine Passions is Leadership. There are Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership:

Model the Way.

Inspire A Shared Vision.

Challenge the Process.

Enable Others to Act.

Encourage the Heart.

Of the Five Practices, “Encourage the Heart” is my favorite. In order to remain Passionate in our profession, we must encourage our Hearts and encourage the Hearts of our teachers, children and all whose life’s we touch.

Educators are the Heart of Learning!

Fichman, Nancy Dana (2009). Leading with passion and knowledge: The principal as action Researcher. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Passions

In our quest for Lifelong Learning, we will lay the foundation for our journey. What kind of inquiry should I do? How will I come up with my “wonderings?”

I started to reflect on last school year and I thought about some of the concerns and issues we faced. Keeping in mind, the ”What if…?“I wonder …,” and “I think…”

There are nine passions, but they do overlap (Venn Diagram). I have to admit, that as I started going through the nine passions, I started feeling a little over whelmed. So I paused “reflected,” and “refueled.”

Passion 1 Staff Development, I love this quotation from Barth:

“Nothing within a school has more impact upon students in terms of skills development, self-confidence, or classroom behavior than the personal and professional growth of their teachers. When teachers examine, question, reflect on their ideas and develop new practices that lead towards their ideals, students are alive. When teachers stop growing, so do their students (Barth, 1981, p. 145).”

As future administrators, we will face the daily challenges to impact student’s and teacher’s learning. Foremost, we must take charge of our own learning and as the “head learner,” we must lead by modeling the process to faculty, staff, and students.

Effective and successful principals us action research as a tool to make effective changes, make improvements, produce academic achievement and promote “Lifelong Learning.” Most important, all nine passions have a common factor “student achievement.”



Barth, R. (1981). The principal as staff developer. Journal of Education, 163(2), 144-162.

Blogging 21st Century Communication

What a magnificent way of being able to communicate our thoughts with individuals in our state, across the country and abroad.

I was thinking about how our class discussion board has evolved into a network of exchanging, and sharing ideas. With this, I got a good feeling inside of me about the way colleagues should interact and learn from each other. There are no “put downs,” we respect and contribute to others thoughts. Blogging is the same way. It is a great to collaborate with other professionals that have similar concerns and issues that we face in our daily challenges of educating our children.

Even though there is distance between all of our classmates and colleagues, I feel a sense of closeness, a relationship of family. What do you think? Would this be a part or aspect of having a positive culture at our school?

Lifelong Learning

Action Research/Inquiry

When I saw the word “Research” I felt a little intimidated and had an unsettled feeling inside of me. I don’t think I would have felt this way, had I received my textbooks early this week. As I read our course syllabus, and watching the class video, I grew confident about the class. I have to thank Holly for writing her blog because reading her blog made me feel more confident and self assured.

I also did some reflecting about issues that we face at my school. Some of the issues that I thought about were block schedules, school culture, and teacher and student morale. Our mathematics depart has been trying to convince our principal to change to mathematics everyday. The mathematics teachers believe that we can have more of a positive impact on student achievement if we see our student’s everyday for a shorter class period (50 minutes versus 80 minutes). Our principal has told us to show her some data to back up our belief. Well, now I am excited about the Action Research model because I will be able to this and more through our action research/inquiry method.

Even though, block schedule is an important issue concerning our campus, I strongly believe that creating a positive school culture is of utmost importance. I want to focus on this issue because I believe that our campus will improve in many areas such as attendance, student achievement (students scoring better on mathematics and other core subjects), decrease behavior problems, have more Pre-Ap classes etc.

Our TEA rating for 2009-2010 is “Recognized.” It is evident that our campus is accomplishing some success, but not enough to make our campus “Exemplary.” Our campus has never received a rating of “Exemplary.”

Having a positive school culture would be a “win/win” situation for all, because teachers improve their teaching and how they feel about themselves and families. All participants are affected in positive ways. This is the “reciprocal” relationship between school climate and family involvement that will be evident at our campus.

We have made big strides at our campus, but I want to see higher test scores in all subjects and high teacher morale. I truly believe this can happen with positive school culture.

With this course, we will possess the skills to conduct action research that will improve our campuses. Lastly, as future leaders, we will be able to justify our actions through the research/inquiry method.