HTH 400: Leadership Fieldwork
The following reflections share my thinking about fieldwork activities that aligned with the California Professional Standards for Educational Leaders.
Questions, comments or want to learn more?
Questions, comments or want to learn more?
CPSEL Standard 1: Vision of Learning
Facilitating the development, articulation, implementation, and stewardship of a vision of learning that is shared and supported by the school community.
Equity in Group WorkHow are students experiencing group work?
"To coach for equity we must intentionally support, guide, and challenge beginning teachers to teach in ways that address the inequities of the school system and turn school life into experiences of academic excellence and consciousness-building that equip students to work for a world of justice and joy" (Ulrich, 2004, p. 2).
Lacy Szuwalski and I collaborated on an equity audit around group work to inform our design of a professional development session called Equity in Group Work. Group work is at the center of much of the student learning that happens at HTe, so we wanted to learn more about how students are experiencing group work. Our primary goal was to take a look at which students were not engaging in group work, and therefore missing out on that important learning. |
Student Ambassador TrainingHow can students take the lead in representing our school?
High Tech High’s mission is to “develop and support innovative public schools where all students develop the academic, workplace, and citizenship skills for postsecondary success” (High Tech High website, accessed 1/23/2015). Organizationally, this means both developing and running these kind of schools as well as supporting others who are working to develop such schools. As part of this mission, High Tech High hosts over 2,000 visitors annually from around the world. Often, these schools are wanting to adopt a more progressive form of education, and are visiting to see an example of how it can be done.
Because we believe in the importance of student voice, student ambassadors offer guided tours of our schools to visitors, even at the elementary level. The purpose of this is not only to give students ownership of the tour process, but also to demonstrate to visitors that we take students seriously. This fieldwork reflection describes how I worked to put student voice at the center of our tour development process. Students did a great job owning the work. Visitor feedback has indicated that our guests find our ambassadors to be welcoming, informative and professional! |
CPSEL Standard 2: Student Learning & Professional Growth
Advocating, nurturing, and sustaining a school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning and staff professional growth.
Visiting Genesee and MakerFaireWhat can we learn from Expeditionary Learning schools and the Maker Movement?
After visiting Genesee Community Charter and New York MakerFaire with my director, I am thinking about how to design a school day to facilitate high levels of student choice and high levels of student support. The ideas that we got from Genesee around flexible organization of the day have impacted my thinking about how the day might be organized at HTe to allow for more student choice and more teacher-student interaction. I am also thinking about how we can encourage our students can be innovative Makers.
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Co-Designing the Parklet ProjectHow can we give students the chance to create beautiful work for an authentic audience?
"Five practices...are essential for creating and sustaining a classroom culture of excellence: (1) assign work that matters; (2) study examples of excellence; (3) build a culture of critique; (4) require multiple revisions; and (5) provide opportunities for public presentation" (Ron Berger, 2003, p. 2).
Grace Maddox and I collaborated on designing a project in which students will design the playground for the new elementary school in Point Loma, and then design a parklet for an area in the local community that has limited recreational spaces. Christine Sullivan's class took the lead on the parklet portion of the project. The project handout can be found here, and the project website can be accessed at http://parklet.weebly.com/. |
CPSEL Standard 3: Organizational Management for Student Learning
Ensuring management of the organization, operations, and resources for a safe, efficient, and effective learning environment.
Creating an effective Local Control Accountability PlanHow can we best support our goals for improvement as a school?
In this fieldwork reflection, I framed the Local Control Funding Formula for faculty and wrote a draft Local Control Accountability Plan for our school to share with faculty for feedback. My goal was to create a plan that both effectively addressed state priority areas and aligned with our school's mission and values to push our work forward. I want to take advantage of this opportunity to define meaningful measures for improvement that will represent the unique work happening at our school.
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CPSEL Standard 4: Working with Diverse Families & Communities
Collaborating with families and community members, responding to diverse community interests and needs, and mobilizing community resources.
Starting a Robotics ClubHow can we foster an engineering identity in all students?
Where are the women in STEM? According to the National Center for Women and Information Technology, (2006), only 24% of professional IT-related occupations in the 2008 workforce were held by women, and only 16% of corporate officer positions at Fortune 500 technology companies were held by women. The number of computer specialist jobs available is quickly outpacing the number of qualified graduates, however female participation is declining. In 2008, only 12% of Computer Science undergraduate degree recipients at major research universities were female, compared with 37% in 1985. A similar trend is occurring in the field of engineering, as described in the Society of Women Engineers’ annual literature review (2012):
"It was possible in the recent past to point to gradual increases in the numbers of women in engineering and to define those increases as positive indicators. Any confidence that it was just a matter of time before gender equality in engineering would be achieved has, instead, been undermined by the reality that those increases have either slowed or stopped altogether" (p. 224). When the need for computer scientists is so high, why are women turning away from the field? The American Association of University Women (2000) found that girls say their lack of interest in computing “has more to do with disenchantment than with anxiety or intellectual deficiency. They say that girls are engaged with the world, while boys are engaged with computers.” (AAUW, 2000, p. 8) By engaging with the world through computers, all students can access critical informational technology skills. AAUW (2000) recommends adapting computing education to meet the interests of girls. Computers are an excellent tool for solving real-world problems, and if we focus on those real-world problems instead of computing as an end goal in itself, girls are more likely to be engaged. I wanted our school to have an inclusive, encouraging robotics program. This fieldwork reflection describes my progress in working to start a sustainable, inclusive robotics program at HTeCV. At the launch of our program, all 32 spaces were filled immediately, and 15 of the 32 of the students to sign up were girls. HTeCV Robotics rocks! |
Hiring an Awesome Staff with Diversity of BackgroundsHow can we recruit the best possible teachers for our school?
I appreciate Debbie Meier’s description of the kind of teachers her team was seeking when opening the experimental new Central Park East School: “Building such schools, we thought, required strong and interesting adults who could exercise their own curiosity and judgement, who knew as learning theorist Eleanor Duckworth put it, what ‘the having of wonderful ideas’ is all about” (Meier, 1995, p. 22). We want teachers who are passionate about teaching, reflective practitioners, willing to take risks to become better educators, and who embrace a pedagogy of student voice and ownership.
Diversity is also important to the health of our school. Debbie Meier explains how the diversity in public schools can train both adults and students for those challenging conversations across critical divisions that are at the heart of our democracy. “It is often in the clash of irreconcilable ideas that we can learn how to test or revise ideas, or invent new ones” (Meier, 1995, p. 7). This fieldwork reflection describes my thinking about our priorities in hiring, the importance of recruiting a diverse candidate pool and the how these ideas informed our recruitment strategy. |
CPSEL Standard 5: Professional Ethics & Leadership Capacity
Modeling a personal code of ethics and developing professional leadership capacity.
HTH Engineering and Group Work WebsitesHow can we share best practices across and beyond our school?
In this fieldwork reflection, I discuss the development of websites to share our work in engineering and in developing equitable group work practices.
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Women in Educational LeadershipHow can we support equity in our schools at all levels?
Education has traditionally been a space where women are active professionally. It used to be one of the only jobs for educated women, and many women made a significant impact in the education space before they were allowed to enter other professional spheres. Even today, women make up a vast majority of the teaching force. According to the National Center for Education Information (Feistritzer, 2011), eighty-four percent of teachers in the United States were female in 2011.
However, the same phenomenon occurs in the education field as in others when it comes to leadership--women become increasingly sparse at higher levels of leadership. According to the Department of Professional Employees, in the 2011-2012 school year, fifty-two percent of public K-12 school principals were women. However, in 2010, twenty-four percent of superintendents in the United States were women, according to a study conducted by the American Association of School Administrators (as cited in School Administrator, 2013). In this fieldwork reflection, I explore issues of opportunity and access for women to lead in educational spaces and the implications for equity in our classrooms. |
CPSEL Standard 6: Legal, Political, Social, Economic and Cultural Issues
Understanding, responding to, and influencing the larger political, social, economic, legal, and cultural context.
Systematically Improving Deeper LearningHow can improvement science support deeper learning?
I see a powerful potential for improvement science to support deeper learning. Not only can educators use improvement science methodologies to work toward deeper learning improvement goals, but the process itself has the potential to engage educators in deeper learning experiences. As teachers work to master educational practices to attain better outcomes, they have to think critically, solve complex problems, work collaboratively, communicate effectively, have a growth mindset and be self-directed. I don’t think, however, that the improvement science framework alone is enough to foster deeper learning for participating adults. Sound educational practices would have to be in place to support the mindsets, collaboration and deep thinking required for meaningful adult learning.
In this fieldwork reflection, I discuss my learning from the Carnegie Foundation Summit on Improvement in Education and the Deeper Learning Conference and my reflections on how the two philosophies can support one another to create better learning experiences for our students system-wide. |