Change - It's taken place

Throughout this class we have been asked to participate, read, and research what it means to be a leader. I feel that my definition of leadership has been altered from this class. Prior to this class, leadership has been, to me, a job role title. Now, I feel that it isn't just a job title, but a way that a person approaches change. Do they take a lead to effect change or are they the Will of the group and just sit back and wait for others to start the change process for them. As a teacher leader, you can be involved in many levels. Just because you work in a high school, you can be a lead other places outside of department head. Any teacher leader can spearhead the acquisition of new technology and software.

Throughout this class I was given more confidence to be a teacher leader. In my current teaching position I have always seen myself as one day becoming the department head, and my current department head has indicated she will see me succeeding in that position. I have started to see myself as someone who can make a push towards getting new technologies to help move our department forward. Through my questioning and persistence, we have been able to acquire a SMART Board for our department. I take every opportunity to learn new technologies that become available to us. I am currently in a group of teacher who are piloting clickers and mobis. I don't think I would have taken that on if I had not seen another opportunity to lead in my department.

I do agree with the book that we need to "improve technology from within." The people making decisions about education in our communities rarely have experience in education and just try to put band-aids on leaks. They need to spend time finding the cause of the leak and figure out the best way to fix it. No one can disagree that teachers are creative. We need to find new ways to work our budget and ensure that our teaching is suitable for the students we currently have, not students we had 10 years ago. My license is built upon the improving from within theory, through PDP's. We need to make ourselves knowledgeable about what is available and out there but we can't always get the new shiny object just because it's desirable. We had a teacher in our school ask for a SMART Board and the principal refused her because she already has a mounted projector, an ELMO, and t.v. If she can improve on what she has, she does not necessarily need a piece of equipment that costs a couple thousand dollars. She needs to find effective, efficient ways to utilize what she has to enhance her curriculum. The technology is only useful if we are willing to use it and it is the best way to implement the subject. I try my best to use what I have and not ache for what I don't. I can only tell myself that my students will learn daily from me.

Change Game

I think this was a really interesting game to play. It would be interesting to see how different teams of teachers would approach this if grouped by the number of years they have been teaching. Would one group do better than other? Would it matter if one group consisted of people you were typically involved in things compared to those like our slow three?

In our group I believe things ran pretty smoothly, but if we would have done a little more planning, it could have been even better. If we would have spent some extra time making a solid map, or plan or where we would like to go throughout the years, we might have avoiding some of the blocks we encountered by not having the ground work ready before we made the move.

This game made me appreciate a little bit more, the amount and effort it takes to try to make a change. Sometimes it is taken for granted how many moves need to be made to make an effective change. We are quick to spot out when there were not enough moves made for the ground work, but going through this, it solidified the fact you need to do the ground work first before you can implement a change. Hopefully this will stick with me for a while.

Change CEDu 527

Change is something we were talking about today during our professional growth day. We are starting to look at standards and are in phase 2 looking at technical plans. We spent the afternoon as a department discussing our program and our standards. We are trying to make a cultural school change towards greater collaboration with respect to planning as well as more common summative and formative assessments. We met with our principal and our curriculum coordinator and looking at the map of change toolkit, we have departments all over the map. Some departments are just starting to work together and others use summative and formative assessments daily. Our administration is recognizing that we are all at different points, which is nice. They are not trying to make us conform to the same structure. The readings we had for this week discussed how effective change can take place and what is needed for it to take place. As we change to improve our teaching, we must not forget that this takes time. It can not be something we pull out once a year, only during professional growth days. We need to make commitments to ourselves and our departments and create time lines for our change and implementation of these changes. If we don't we are just "saying" we'll do it, and just doing it so appease our boss. We need to buy into what we are doing and/or make it something we can buy into if we don't agree with the projected outcome. I hope our department can continue to work well together to change for the better.

Change

This week during in our class we looked at a couple of different power points about Change. The presentation which resonated the most with me was "Who Moved My Cheese?" This week we spent a day at school discussing Power Standards and picking which of the state standards we were focusing on in Algebra 1. There are a couple teachers in my department who are close to retirement. One of their philosophies is "This too shall pass." I find that a little sad. While the state of education has changed a lot over the course of their teaching career, they should be more willing to adapt for the benefit of their students. My entire educational practice and education has been built on standards so I am quite familiar with it. As educators we need to be open to new ideas and new ways to look at things. That does not always mean that you need to agree with every thing, but you need to be willing to be open to it.

In the slide show the mice that were willing to go out and seek new cheese sources reminded me that I need to be a little more proactive in my own leadership and teaching. Our district is not always forthright with the technology available or some glaze over it. Our entire department was solicited to participate in a Clickr piloting session and I was the only one who responded that I would be willing to go and when I got back and started telling my co-workers about it, they they took an interest. We need to be willing to try new things and seek out new technologies to enhance our effectiveness as educators. I know that with budgets constantly tightening we will need to do more as a department to seek outside funding and since I am one of those people who would like to work with it, I need to step-up and find out additional sources for raising money as a department to acquire more interactive whiteboards for our classes. We teach our kids that if you want something you have to work at it, so why should it be any different when we are adults. It isn't always ask and you shall receive... but that would be nice!