Leading Educators: March 2013

2013/03/29

Reflections on Leading Educators’ Facilitator Induction: Harnessing the Power of TEAM

On March 9th, fourteen new and seven veteran Leading Educators Facilitators converged on the beautiful campus of Tulane University. We came together not only to learn how to deliver high quality seminars and ground in the Leading Educators culture but, perhaps more importantly, to make these powerful decisions: Who can we be and what can we accomplish together? Our answers to these questions give life, give a spirit to our work. It strikes me that these are the kind of decisions that drive the life of our schools daily, and the answers that the teacher-leaders with whom we work will learn to bring to the foreground in their school communities.

As a facilitator body, we live all over the United States: Colorado, Missouri, Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and New York. We have different roles in the landscape of educational transformation: some of us are program directors or administrators working inside public districts, some of us are independent educational consultants and trainers, some of are retired leaders whose spark for impacting the lives of kids and teachers has only gotten brighter over the years. We each bring different strengths and experiences.

As we shared our backgrounds and engaged in hearty dialogue and practice, I realized that our differences converge, like the instruments in a symphony, in a powerful mission and vision:

Our Mission: Re-imagining and delivering a robust, consistent, and sustainably impactful core Leading Educators curriculum
Our Vision: every teacher and every student achieves extraordinary success through strong, impassioned, visionary teacher-leaders.

I am looking forward to what unfolds as we continue to harness the power of team, among our facilitator body and extending into the teams our teacher-leaders create in their schools.

– Dawnelle J. Hyland, Transformational Leadership Trainer and Consultant

Dawnelle Hyland’s background spans both educational and corporate domains, where her career has been focused on building impactful, visionary leaders. She is deeply passionate about supporting teachers in developing their leadership talents, and supporting school administrators in creating thriving, leadership-based school cultures.

2013/03/19

Widening Our Scope with Webinars

Our First Webinar: Blended Learning

A slide from our webinar on Blended Learning.

Leading Educators launched its first webinar for Fellows and staff on a Saturday morning earlier this month. The timely topic was Blended Learning. This new innovation in education is the fusion of technology and differentiated learning; it brings online education into classrooms and into students’ home lives in order to meet students where they are and allow them to take their own learning to the next level. Blended Learning empowers teachers to work directly in small groups while some of their students are on computers; many of the online programs provide teachers with real-time data reporting out how students are performing in online coursework so that teachers can quickly determine what to reteach or where students may be ready for advanced learning.

The webinar’s objective was to enable participants to create and implement a plan to utilize whatever technologies currently exist in their schools. The webinar allowed time for participants to become familiar with the terminology of Blended Learning, walked participants through potential classroom set-ups to incorporate blended learning, highlighted exemplary schools that modeled various ways to incorporate the technology, and gave participants time to interact with many of the websites and programs that are currently available to teachers and students.

Anna Lavely, a Kansas City Fellow who attended the webinar, had this to say about it:

“The webinar was engaging and interactive which allowed me to visually see and try the new technology rather than just hear or read about it. I have already begun incorporating some of the Blended Learning practices that were addressed in the webinar through the sites shown for the ‘re-teaching’ of concepts in station format.”

Leading Educators is excited to offer more of our professional development sessions to a wider audience via webinar in the coming months. Please stay up to date at @leadingeds and join us on the webinar that’s right for you in the near future!

2013/03/12

CEO's "Helping Education Leaders Grow" Published in Education Week

Leading Educators CEO Jonas Chartock and School Leaders Network founder and CEO Elizabeth Neale recently co-authored an article on the importance of teacher-leaders in supporting principals and growing teacher satisfaction and retention. Check-out "Helping Education Leaders Grow" in its entirety below or here.

It's time to dispel the perception that school principals have all the skills and capacity they need to be successful leaders as soon as they leave principal-preparation programs.

istockphoto/Mark Stay

Consider findings from the latest MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, a work that always seems to get to the heart of education's biggest questions. Responses to the recently released 29th annual survey offer interesting—and troubling—insights into school leadership.

Among the survey's startling findings:

• "Three-quarters of all principals say the job has become too complex, and nearly half report feeling under great stress several times a week or more."

• "Teacher satisfaction has declined 23 percentage points since 2008," to its lowest level in 25 years, in 2012 (dropping from 62 percent to 39 percent). We acknowledge, however, that some have raised questions about the interpretation and quality of the findings on this point.

• "Less-satisfied teachers" are more likely to be located in schools where professional development and time for teacher collaboration have declined (21 percent vs. 14 percent).

• "More principals find it challenging to maintain an adequate supply of effective teachers in urban schools and in schools" where two-thirds or more of the students come from low-income households (60 percent vs. 43 percent in suburban schools and 44 percent in rural schools).

Clearly, principals and teachers face numerous challenges. In large part because of the factors cited above, teachers and principals in the United States leave their positions in the first five years at high rates. It's clear the nation must find a way to support these overstressed leaders and increasingly less-satisfied teachers, especially in our high-poverty areas. We can do so by developing the leadership competencies of current principals, future principals, and teacher-leaders.

The MetLife survey cites the stress that principals identify when they don't have the capacity to lead, especially in schools where student achievement is low and poverty is high. The survey's authors say it "underscores the fact that teachers today play a key part in the leadership of their schools. Half of teachers play some function in formal leadership," whether as mentors or leadership-team members.

The need for better leadership preparation is clear. Before they are asked to take on prospective executive leadership roles, new principals and teacher-leaders should be well grounded in the skills needed to manage adults.

“If we are serious about increasing student achievement, we need to act now to retain the good to great teachers and leaders.”

Opportunities for fellowships and continuous professional development as teacher-leaders would augment the base knowledge and abilities of school leaders before they change their roles. And, once they land in leadership positions, principals need continuous collaborative support and development.

It takes a leadership team composed of a school principal and teachers leading in varied capacities to get to greater student success. If we are serious about increasing student achievement, we need to act now to retain the good to great teachers and leaders. The New Teacher Project's recent report "The Irreplaceables" clarifies that we are often not only losing the best new teachers, but that those who stay do so with the strongest and most effective principals. This team of effective leaders and principals helps students gain an additional five to six months of student learning each year, according to the TNTP report.

From our perspective, here's what we feel the education community must do to effectively counter the growing trends and realities highlighted in the MetLife survey:

• Provide current principals with continuous post-training/post-mentoring support and development to accelerate leadership skills. In a study released by the Wallace Foundation in January, researchers stressed that effective leaders must shape a vision of academic success for all students, improve instruction, and become dynamic leaders able to manage, for example, people, data, and processes. Developing those skills takes an ongoing effort targeted to increase student outcomes. And it must be anchored in research that focuses on greater leadership capacity.

• Provide multiple, structured career pathways for educators. With formal, appropriately compensated middle-leader roles available, aspiring school leaders may find a more intentional, longer-term approach to the principalship more attractive. Research indicates that by developing the leadership skills of teachers, they will not only remain in the classroom, but will also expect to take on new responsibilities and expand their influence. The key to retaining the most effective of our educators lies in developing their skills for success.

• Offer outstanding fellowship and training experiences to teachers who will not only become tomorrow's principals, but who—right now—can move the needle on student achievement and add to the leadership capacity of their schools, helping each school's instructional community to improve. In so doing, we will build a network of midlevel teacher-leaders who have the wherewithal to best support their new colleagues while limiting the attrition of our most promising educators.

The MetLife survey should serve as a reminder not only that we have much to do to strengthen our schools, but also that there are proven actions we can take to bolster the quality of principal and teacher leadership for our students.

Elizabeth Neale is the founder and chief executive officer of the School Leaders Network, a nonprofit organization based in Hinsdale, Mass., that is committed to accelerating the leadership skills of principals and aspiring principals to increase student achievement. Jonas S. Chartock is the CEO of Leading Educators, a nonprofit organization based in New Orleans that trains teachers to lead their colleagues in the pursuit of student success.

Education Week Vol. 32, Issue 24, Pages 24-25

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