My First 2013 management meeting

Being in the education profession, one of the set of leadership practices must include instructional leadership. Elements found in instructional leadership shared by my school leader during the first management meeting of the year include beliefs, knowledge, people skills, planning, processes and monitoring and review. I believe that her effort is to improve the academic instruction in the school by doing what is necessary to help our teachers to translate the expectations of the desired outcomes of education into effective classroom practices. I see this as especially crucial in my school, where teacher’s current approaches to instruction have not been very successful with students.

Based on my fellow colleagues’ sharing, such instructional supports also include having clarity of instructions, knowledge and expectations of instructions, achievement of targets, role-modeling and sharing of pedagogy and ownership. To me, all these meant providing significant amount and multiple types of support to our teachers for their instructional work. The sharing also indicated to me that as middle managers, our instructional support must include urging our teachers and students to put a much stronger emphasis on student academic achievement regardless of stream. By focusing on and priority made to the academic instruction with contributions from everyone, I believe that our student academic work and achievement can then improve.

Equally important is my school leader spending much of her time providing clarity on what was needed to be accomplished for the semester and creating a sense of accountability for those goals through widely disseminated expectations, starting with us middle managers. In this way, the school then works towards a common set of targets, thus effectively establishing a whole school approach for all teachers and students in the school.