My Leadership Philosophy

Personal Philosophy
For the last few weeks, I have been considering my own personal leadership philosophy. I think my personal philosophy aligns most closely with Participative Leadership. It is important to me that the decision making processes of the group are considered and valued. By engaging all stakeholders in the decision making process, I believe it increases the school effectiveness. This approach gives members of a school community ownership and pride in the school, helping to create a better place for learning to take place.

Making it Meaningful
I have been working on creating my own personal mission statement. I wanted to ensure that my mission statemnet really meant something to me and that it was both authentic and meaningful. It was important for me to remind myself when creating this that it needed to include specific actions that I will take. I need to decide exactly what to do in order to work towards accomplishing my goals. The following is my working mission statement. I have chosen to share it because I think that makes me more accountable.

Personal Mission Statement:
"As a edtech teacher leader I seek to use the participative/distributed approach to leadership because I value the input of all stakeholders. I will support the development of the organization by fostering collaborative processes through social networking sites, specifically those with a focus on education. I will work on modeling a positive attitude to aid in promoting an enjoyable and productive work environment and school culture. In the classroom, I will try varied methods of delivering instruction with a focus on technology integration. I will reflect upon and share these experiences with my colleagues both in the school setting and online using my blog and other social media outlets. I will adapt my practice in response to feedback received as a result of these reflections"

I am open to suggestions and comments, please feel free to share!

In our cohort class we looked at case study 11.1, called "The Discouraging Grade" from the book, Case Studies:
This case study was found on page 87-88.

Case study resources:

Differentiation-Teaching, Learning and Leadership
http://www.scoop.it/t/differentiation-teaching-learning-leadership

Survive and Thrive-  Virtual Conference for Begging Teachers
http://www.survivethrive.on.ca/

Teacher Relationships

http://msan.wceruw.org/resources/Teacher%20Relationships.pdf

Teachers as Leaders

It can be very difficult to define what it means to be a leader. There are several definitions of leadership I have been considering in the last week or so but the one that has the most meaning to me is the following:

"By leadership, I mean influencing others’ actions in achieving desirable ends. Leaders are people who shape the goals, motivations, and actions of others. Frequently they initiate change to reach existing and new goals." - (Cuban 1988)

The question then is how can teachers influence other teachers in achieving desirable ends. I think that an important way teachers can do this is by taking time to teach other educators how to use different tools, strategies and methods in the classroom. 

For example, I am currently working on a presentation for my Methods class in how to use LiveBinders for our own culminating task. We have all been working since September to build a Teacher Candidate Handbook which was divided into two categories, curricular and extracurricular which we subdivided into topics such as: community building, assemblies, tech tools, DPA and many more.  We all worked on them individually. Some of us used paper and pen, some used Google Docs and some used Word programs on their computer but what we want now is to put them together so that we can share the information with our entire class. We each only worked on two sections but we want to see all of it since we have all collaborated. A fellow classmate and I volunteered to help the class set it up on LiveBinders even though neither of us have used the tool in THIS way.  Setting it up included making the accounts and preparing a half hour presentation which would help show our class how to use it themselves. In this way we created a Professional Development presentation as well a solution to our culminating unit issue. Even though we were both familiar with the program, figuring out how we could use it for this project and deciding how to teach our colleagues was a whole other manner. 

We have been working on our PD presentation for a few days now and it is coming together. By teaching our class how to use this tool, we are not only helping them complete a project but also teaching them a tool they can use as teachers. LiveBinder is GREAT for organizing resources and you can even use it with a class, similar to how we are. Preparing this does take extra time but I think it is important because it helps our class move towards our common goal.

Preparing this presentation really made me think about what it means to be a leader when it comes to using technology in education. Even though I am nervous to present because I definitely do not know everything about this tool nor have I used it in this way, I am taking the risk because I think this information is important to share. It will help us reach our common goal and can provide a tool to support a class of future educators in the future. Many of you are likely already teacher leaders and you don't even know it!


 If you haven't checked out LiveBinders before, I suggest you do. You can use it just like you would real binders but it is all online. It is a way to organize links, word documents and images all in one place-public or private. There are also lots of resources available because people have made binders and chosen to share them. For example, here is a LiveBinder that has many different links to SmartBoard resource sharing sites. 

What should a 21st century classroom look like?

I went to the Queens Conference on Education last weekend in Kingston and in the opening activity we were asked to write a list of words that described a 21^st century learner and a 21^st century educator.  I found this comforting because the day before in a Tech Ed. leadership class at Brock we were asked the question, what should a 21^st Century classroom look like? In addition, another one of my classes we created a new teacher handbook and I was responsible for the section on tech tools. With others, I am collaborating to provide examples of helpful tools for new teachers, as well as attempting to answer the question, How can tech tools help to support 21^st century learning skills?

We are all asking the same question. What I am finding is there are many answers and many more ways to organize your answer. At the conference we left it at a short list of five words and moved on to individual workshops that attempted to address this and other compelling issues in education. In Ed. tech class we used Google docs to collaborate a list of words to describe the cultural, physical, academic and technical aspects of the 21^st century classroom. From there we found links to support or explain those words and concepts. In the handbook, I tried to sum up what I knew on the topic into only one page.

There are many ways to answer this question but what I find most helpful is seeing and hearing about teacher’s examples that they are using in the classroom. I use sites such as Pinterest, Livebinder and Twitter because they are rich with examples of 21^st century lessons and ideas. Of course, one must discriminate between what will work for them and what will not, but also they must decide what really supports his/her vision of a 21^st century classroom. I have set my own goal which is to work on really contributing to these sharing communities in the coming months. I want to upload my own lessons and make my own collections that I can share.

-Rachel 

Reflection

I have really enjoyed creating my own professional blog as well as my sample classroom blog. Through creating them, I have learned a lot about my personal teaching philosophy. I especially like the connections I have made because of my blog and twitter accounts. I feel they have helped me expand my PLN and will continue to in the future.  I really enjoy working with other professionals through collaboration. It has been a great resource! Seeing what others are doing in their classrooms has been very helpful, encouraging, and inspiring.

Creating my learning object was a good experience and I am happy I have had many chances to use it with my class. The informal feedback I have gotten from my associate teacher and the students has been encouraging. I will certainly use a learning object like this is the future, as it is so easy to adapt to various subjects and grade levels.

In the creation of this blog, I have learned how to embed videos, create slide-shows, link to web-pages and create new pages. I have also learned how classroom blogs can be used as a means to connect with and communicate with parents.

I feel like my blog has a long way to go, but I see it as a working document; always changing and evolving. Because of the PLN I have created, I have many example of online education portfolios which inspire me. I will continue to work on my blog and my online contribution to the educational world. Please check back in the future! I imagine you will see quite a change.

I have now had my first days of observation at my placement school. I am placed in a grade 5 class at Mount Albion Elementary School. I had a great first few days and I took some pictures to share.

My associate teacher is working to encourage co-operation and group work with the way her classroom is set up. This of course is accompanied by carefully planned lessons and activities. The students do not have assigned seats but instead, can choose to sit at any of the seating areas that she has set up. She has a combination of chairs, stools and carpets areas that the students can choose from.

In addition there is a larger carpeted area where the students gather for class discussions and lessons. The students have been promised by their teacher that she will not have them listening at the carpet for more than 15 minutes at a time. The switch between teacher directed and student directed learning keeps the students engaged and active in constructing their learning.

Around the room, one can find math mulipuatives and a library area organized by genre.

This set-up allows for students to participate in group work with different individuals at different times for different activities. The students seem to enjoy working in groups and best of all they are learning lots of information in meaningful ways. She sure has done a great job of making this small porta-pack room invinting and educational for her students!

Dream come true for an internet lover!

I made the mistake tonight of setting up my reading area right next to my twenty inch computer monitor. It certainly made it difficult to concentrate! The whole time, all I wanted to do was go on the internet to check my twitter, read some blogs, explore these webquests, google stuff, find an excuse to make a glog/figure out what that was, maybe check facebook, youtube a favourite song and read some articles about how teachers were using tech. Really anything online seemed much more appealing than what I was doing! And this is not because I don’t like reading or what I was reading, I just really, really like using the computer and the internet. This is not new for me, I have always loved the internet and I have always been a fairly early adapter to new tech tools. I mostly like free things and things that help me explore the internet but I never really focused my joy of all thing web on anything specific An example of my often misdirected addiction, I had one follower on twitter for an entire year and I still used it. ONE! (that really makes it quite pointless and I don’t recommend it by the way) but I was determined to figure out what all the (nerdy) fuss was about. Eventually it caught on and here we are, using it to become better educators. That makes me really happy. But I often thought of my love for the internet as just a hobby and in my younger years was more or less discouraged in my house, especially during the dark, dark days of dial up because it tied up the phone lines (not to mention was incredibly slow). I liked the internet and I have always seen its incredible potential as a personal tool but I didn’t really expand that to think about how I really use it. I actually have taken some technology and education courses in the past but it still seemed really far off to use these technologies in the classroom, but now I see people are using tech tools in their classrooms! It is happening, people. And the best part is I can even see me using them! I loving having a reason to obsess over and check out online tools. Tech tools will help me be a better teacher and they can help your students learn more effectively. Oh, and they are fun :) It can be overwhelming because there is a lot out there, and I can tell that some of my fellow classmates feel like they might have already had too much. The thing is we are getting a lot of information right now and it is an opportunity for incredible growth and experimentation but when it comes done to it, we are the ones planning our lessons and it is up to us to decide what we like and what works for us. My challenge will be using these things in front of a classroom and stepping out of my comfort zone. It will be difficult teaching with a technology that you haven’t really seen modeled very much but I am hoping that we can find a balance between trying new things and doing that which is natural to us.