Learning the Tools for Success Through Group Work

This course gave you an opportunity to practice a range of leadership strategies when making decisions. It required you to think politically, orchestrate collaboration among all stakeholders, and remain steadfast in your original vision. 


What do you envision to be the pitfalls you might face as a first year principal, and how will you implement the strategies learned to overcome the pitfalls? How has this course prepared you to use twenty-first century leadership skills as you model a new culture for collaborating, analyzing student performance, and continually reflecting on instructional practices, school climate, and quality decision-making?

As I walk toward a path for leadership, I envision that the first year will be challenging because I know that I will want to aim high and accomplish much, probably too much. Throughout the course of this program, I’ve accumulated a variety of excellent strategies and important concepts that I see missing in the school where I’m working. I need to remember that change doesn’t happen overnight and having a plan to correct the mistakes I see takes time and collaboration with others so that the ideals I envision are shared amongst all stakeholders.

Since I worked for many years in a high intensity career through work at the Academy of Achievement (www.achievement.org) that demanded me to think politically and work productively in a large team while accomplishing the task at hand, I know that personally I am capable of handling leadership tasks. I also know that I have developed distinct ideas about where I want to go professionally. For one, I have no interest in being a principal. What I want is to be a leader in technology. Knowing that is important. Throughout this program, observing teachers and students while doing my work, and through a significant effort in looking at the research I’ve begun to develop my own ideas about how to use technology effectively and plan for successful integration. I think it’s very important to identify that for me, my goal is to be the best at leadership in technology because that allows me to concentrate my talents in this area.

In this course, I relished the intense concentration on finding excellent academic research relating to the topics of vision, management, student learning, technology and ethics. The time allowed to pursue knowledge and ground my ideas in research was thrilling and important. I especially enjoyed discovering three books that I referred to often on my paper including: Richard Elmore's Instructional Rounds in Education, John Hattie's Visible Learning, and Linda Darling-Hammond's The Flat World and Education. I believe I will use the data and ideas contained in these books over and over again.

 Recently I did a project with my 5th/6th grade students on the topic of recycling. While they learned about the subject, the most important lesson that every single student took away was their experience working in groups. Some groups performed at a very high level and some were quite dysfunctional, yet everyone noted that this experience is what they remembered and would use again. While I felt that teaching them built on group work I’d done professionally before entering education, the emphasis on group work in this program has had a huge impact on me as a leader and something I will remember and use in the future.

My group in this course functioned at a very high level. Each of us – Brooke, Barb, Shannon, and myself – brought different angles to the conversation, and used that to build on ideas, support one another, and create a working environment that was extremely productive and satisfying. Since group work is such an important component of being a leader in education, the experience I’ve shared with my treasured colleagues will be most memorable and important as I work to emulate the experience as an education technology leader.

Co-Teaching Success

Entry #1: Co-Teaching- Share your thoughts about the co-teaching model? What impact does the upgrade of curriculum for the 21st century have on co-teaching? As a curriculum supervisor or leader, what challenges would you have supervising and evaluating a co-teaching team, and how might supervisors address these challenges?

The co-teaching model to help students with disabilities in the classroom is a potentially positive step in allowing students to learn. I don’t have a lot of experience with co-teaching, but I’ve seen it used successfully both in the school I work at and in a 5th grade classroom when my son shared a classroom with an autistic student. In both cases, the co-teacher was involved with the curriculum planning, but then worked on specific plans to adapt the lessons for the student. In the case of the autistic boy, occasionally that meant taking the student out of the class for physical movement or to do specialized activities. When the boy was in 3rd and 4th grade, the co-teacher spent most of her time with the student, but in 5th grade, there was a planned movement to teach the child to become more independent in preparation for entry into middle school. This strategy worked well and the student has done well in middle school. Another strategy that worked well with this student included identifying a few students in the class to serve as mentors. These mentors looked out for the boy and they all formed a close bond.

As a leader, I would look at how the teachers separated the duties in the class and then also how they collaborated together on where the class curriculum would be the same for all students and where it would be different. This is a case where watching them work in the classroom after they’ve shown me a lesson that they collaborated on would provide adequate knowledge that the model was working for the teachers, and more importantly, for the students.

Individualizing the Curriculum with Electives

Entry #2: Individualizing the Curriculum- Select one model or individualized program from Chapter 15 of the Glatthorn text that you think would work best. Explain your choice and reasons supporting it. What, if anything, would need to change in your school or district to adapt it, and how as a curricular leader would you make those changes?

This is actually a really hard blog post to write because in my town, many of the ideas identified as individualizing the curriculum are already embedded somewhere or were tried (such as open classrooms) and failed.

Encouraging students to explore their particular passions is a challenge in most schools with a large diverse population and shrinking school budgets. While large swaths of the country have eliminated elective courses, Greenwich has a rich tradition of offering amazing opportunities that engage a wide variety of students. The Greenwich High School catalog resembles a small college and includes eclectic (and popular) offerings across the subjects, especially in the arts. Being the only high school with a population of 2700 students provides a broad base of support for the extensive offerings. The courses are not a mish-mash of items, but a guided discovery for advancement by students that include four levels of electronic music (including honors), 19 different musical performing groups, three levels of cooking including a honors in Culinary Skills, transportation and energy technology in Engineering and more.

I believe that part of the support comes from the international nature of the residents who want their children to have exposure to a wide range of subjects and encourage this. I went to Greenwich High Schools and my favorite class, was on East Asian history. I guess the course China Today that my son took last semester would be its replacement. While I know that large areas of the country don’t have the type of elective offerings that Greenwich does, my experience with it is absolutely lacking. But I support elective offerings in schools as long as its supported by the community and there should be some sort of procedure in place to allow the expansion of courses, but the process should vet ideas and test their appropriateness. As a curricular leader, I’d support a rich load of elective courses, especially at the middle school where students want to begin to explore new options. But adding new courses takes collaboration and consideration as to the unintended consequences (what gets cut out if a student take the elective etc.). Before adding a course, would the topic be best served as an after-school club? These and other questions about staffing, space, and budget need to be discussed.

Curriculum Through the Ages

Image: Edudemic, 2011

What are some of the societal forces that influence school curricula today?
How do curriculum definitions, curricular history, and theoretical approaches and policy progress relate to major societal forces such as technology and the world at large?
How might a school leader be proactive in the advent of these types of influences in terms of curricular offerings?

With little knowledge of curriculum prior to the beginning of this class, the readings have been an enlightening experience in the development of the role of curriculum in education. By and large, this development has been influenced by the forces in history such as war, unrest, depression, space exploration, and important figures such as Dewey, Piaget, Bloom, Banks, Eisner and Darling-Hammond to name a few. These historical influences have had a large influence on the schools through publications that helped define what happens in the curriculum in schools. For instance, the space race in the 1960s influenced the emphasis on science curriculum, which was developed by scholars and the inclusion of physics as an important science in school. The counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s influenced an experimentation of alternative schools and open classroom environments, which likely then led to a trend toward conservatism that reflected a yearning for stability that is still evident today (Glatthorn, Boschee, Whitehead & Boschee, 2011).

Growing up, I experienced school during the period called Privatistic Conservatism (1975 to 1989) that looked to increase rigor and back to basics in schools, and started the trend of accountability that is highly prevalent today. However, in 1982, when I graduated from high school, the goals of this period were not evident to me as a student. State exams or the ideas of multiculturalism by Banks were non-existent to me as a student. Teachers were the most important element when it came to curriculum and courses by teachers who were known to be “great,” were popular and influential. Has this really changed? Today, students at Greenwich High School (also my high school in 1982) flock to course taught by teachers who are dynamic whether or not they hold a strong interest in the course initially. Teachers remain the greatest determinant for students, especially at the high school level, of the impact of curriculum on a student. As such, the major challenge today for school leaders is to train their staff to teach at a very high level. Finland focused on this aspect in the development of their educational system, which today is considered one of the best in the world in part because of the high quality of their teaching staff. One axiom identifies “curriculum change depends on people to implement the changes,” (Oliva, n.d.) implying that teachers must be at the heart of the process and actively involved with working collaboratively to plan the best way to help students discover and be excited by the content.

The role of technology has always had an important part in history for students though I use this term in a broad sense. Technology includes: the development of the chalkboard (1890), pencil (1900) and ballpoint pen (1940), radio (1925) of which was used to broadcast lesson in New York City, slide rule (1950), photocopier (1959), or calculator (1970) (Dunne, 2011); each of these had a unique impact on education in the way that we might consider the computer in another 40 or 50 years. While I am a fan of the use of technology (in the current sense) and global learning, I’ve seen both applied poorly without context. Ultimately, the ability of the teacher to use the current technology with knowledge of the goals for learning and an understanding of the student’s needs, will best teach the curriculum. How the curriculum is defined and categorized in theoretical terms has expanded and become more complicated over time, but this doesn’t change the impact of teachers have on student learning. I found the extensive descriptions of the variety of curricular theories to be the type of learning that a student might experience in an AP class and one that is forgotten immediately after the exam. While I understand the need to organize the wide variety of theories identified, I think each idea could be used when needed. If properly trained, the teacher, knowing all of the ways to present curriculum and the content that needs to be taught, should be able to individualize the classroom experience so that each student learns to the best of their ability

Dunne, J. (2011, April 18). The evolution of classroom technology. Edudemic. Retrieved from: http://edudemic.com/2011/04/classroom-technology/

Glatthorn, A., Boschee, F., Whitehead, B., Boschee, B. (2011). Curriculum leadership: Strategies for development and implementation, 3rd edition. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Oliva, P. (n.d.) 10 Axiom's for Curriculum Development. [Slides]. United States: Johns Hopkins University. Retrieved from: https://connect.johnshopkins.edu/curricwk2/