Sunday, July 29, 2012

My Teachers have spoken – on my Leadership


2012 is my first year as the People Developer and so I wanted to spend time to assess my current leadership level. Both teachers under my charge were asked to fill out an electronic survey anonymously in July. Below is a “summary” of my leadership survey result which indicate that my current leadership level is at level 2 (Permission: People follow me because they want to) with both teachers. 

Being also my first year as the People Developer (PD) to both my teachers, the survey results showed that I have managed to win over my teachers to level 2 and that both of them has allowed themselves to be won over.

In retrospect, below are five behaviors and beliefs which I thought are related to my current level of leadership.
1. Accept my teachers as a part of leading – Learn to accept responsibility to help my teachers and deal with messy side of my teachers as well
2. Getting teachers to understand where I am coming from – Recognize that I try to balance between people and work. While I put people ahead of academic results, students’ learning is ahead of people.
3. Become my teacher’s Encourager – Give my teachers confidence and make them feel good about themselves
4. Express value for each teacher – Take time and come up with positive things to honestly say of my teachers
5. Evaluate where I am with my teachers – Set aside time to get to know my teachers better

The survey results also indicated areas where I will need to give my attention when working with my teachers to improve my leadership ability to level 3 and 4. Below are two areas of improvement which I will focus on this year. These include working with individual teachers and providing specific processes to help individual teachers improving her teaching capability.

- Although the teachers felt that as a team, we have become more productive. There is a need to develop individual teachers so that the teacher can become more productive as a result. I will need to develop my individual teacher as well so that she can lead together.


- Although the teachers saw that I have attempted to model and helped them to develop. I need also to equip my teachers with specifics skills so as to enable them to do their job and do them well. Hence, I will endeavor my mini-observation using the five-step equipping process suggested by John Maxwell namely
Step 1 – I do it (competence)
Step 2 – I do it and you are with me (demonstration)
Step 3 – You do it and I am with you (coaching)
Step 4 – You do it (empowerment)
Step 5 – You do it and someone is with you (reproduction)







Keeping this survey results in mind and focusing on the two areas of improvement, namely working with individual teachers and providing specific processes to help individual teachers improve teaching capability, I hope to better develop my leadership skills so as I advance both my teachers and team.











Sunday, July 15, 2012

Review on my Professional Development on Formative Assessment


One of the key massages of the trainer, Susann M. Brookhart on formative assessment is that the effective use of formative assessment can significantly improve student learning and raise teacher quality. Hence, both teachers and students must be sufficiently familiar and equipped with the knowledge or skill to put such assessment to work for themselves (teachers and students). Another take-away from the workshop was that teachers must convey and put information about learning into the hands of the most important decision makers of all – the students. Hence, what is important is the ways that formative assessment process, in particular the specifics which will enable students to make use of their own minds to be intentional and skilled learner.

While I agree on the importance of students themselves taking responsibility for their own learning, the focus in my classroom level practice will be on using formative assessment as part of my instructional intervention – the process which enables students to be independent learners. This arises from my belief that effective formative assessment will help us teachers in supporting our students learning – that is to enable teachers to check for student understanding.

The full day workshop last Friday presented us with formative assessment practices that help students learn how to learn. She frames the learning–assessment process with these key questions which are aligned to the objectives of my school’s assessment framework.
- Where am I going?
- Where am I now?
- How am I getting there?

By answering the assessment question (Where am I now?), in relation to instructional goal (Where am I going?) with specifics on addressing what is needed to reach the goal (How am I getting there?), the formative assessment process directly supports improvement in student learning.

Ideally, then, formative assessment should be seamlessly integrated with my classroom instruction. In my desire to incorporate formative assessment with instructions, placing particular emphasis on the ways that such processes enable students to learn – I will begin by focusing on content. I hope through my engagement in content, such formative assessment will become meaningful, for both myself as the teacher as well as my students – our wanting (for students and students themselves) to learn. Then, consider the learning progression… to be continued.