AUSSIE

Blog entry posted November 16th, 2009 by Liz Irwin

Election Day has just passed, and across New York City people were engaged in a process of contributing their voice to the decision-making processes of the city. Three New York schools were also involved in a similar process - giving voice to teacher leadership and empowering all teachers in a faculty to make critical strategic decisions about their whole school improvement plans for the year. This has taken time and most importantly, working through a series of data and outcome driven processes led by a collaborative team of transformational school leaders and the AUSSIE consultant who all believe in building the collective voice of all staff in strategic decision-making and ultimately building a true professional learning community.

With a research-based systemic framework as a guiding model that aligns all school data to a viable action plan, each school has been involved with the AUSSIE Leadership change agency in developing a strategic whole school action plan that encompasses all aspects of school improvement, focused on the moral purpose of schooling, every child achieving maximum outcomes. While this has occurred on several specific stages, a huge step was realized last Tuesday when groups of empowered teachers led the rest of the staff in developing and reviewing the whole school action plan for 2009/2010.

One school had had all staff involved in the development of the plan last June, in readiness for the 2009/2010 school year. On Election Day, they worked as a whole school team to collectively monitor their achievements to date and collaboratively formulate plans for “actioning” and taking responsibility for areas not yet addressed.

Another school finished analyzing their systemic and school-based data in groups and worked in teams led by key teachers to develop this year’s plan within the systemic framework model, cognizant of last year’s achievements and driven by the data to formulate the whole school priorities and needs.

The third school had each teacher involved in reviewing and monitoring their achievements in the plan to this point, working within the framework of building a professional learning community. Groups of teachers led all staff to reflect on the strategic plan and contribute their ideas to making this a “living, breathing document” that consistently and collaboratively is used to guide school improvement.

These processes have evolved in these schools over the last three years and of interest, naturally align to this year’s new emphasis on distributive leadership structures within the Quality Review rubric.

The important element in the improvement of any school is “the commitment and persistence of the educators within it” (Du Four, 2003). Every educator at each of these schools  was absolutely inspirational in their involvement in voicing their beliefs and ideas, ultimately taking collective responsibility for student learning. All school leaders were equally inspirational in trusting the process and having the belief in teacher leadership as an essential underpinning of their school’s culture of success. It was such a privilege to be part of the journey in each of these professional learning communities. “In the end, distributive leadership does not involve dividing leadership responsibilities or delegating them but rather seeing leadership coalesce around focused instruction….everyone needs to be a leader, and leaders from all levels must be engaged in changing the context as a whole…these are our ‘system thinkers in action’” (Fullan, 2005; Fullan, Crevola and Hill, 2006, p. 92).

Leave a comment below and tell me about your successful PD this past election day!