How Leadership Teams Are Responsible And Accountable For Implementing Improvement Strategies

Leadership- should reflect the team’s stage of development. Leaders should motivate, facilitate goal setting, educate and evaluate achievements.

For me, leadership is about understanding your team, allowing team members to play to their unique strengths while providing opportunities to address personal weaknesses. A team, when managed properly, can accomplish as much as a single individual – times however many individuals serve on the team. As a high school student, I have leadership experience in all sorts of teams, but my experience in Science Olympiad is the most rewarding.

First of all, continual feedback allows teachers to self-reflect on best practices. For example, a teacher can target his/her areas of weakness in order to grow professionally and gain further insight of best practices. Another benefit, of teacher evaluations is higher student success rates. These, for example, are measurable through district assessments and state standardized assessments. If a teachers success rate has significantly improved through modification of practices, T-TESS has served its intended purpose. Finally, yet another benefit of teacher evaluations is the fact that the educator is an active participant in his/her evaluation process. For example, through goal setting, the educator is allowed the opportunity to decide where he/she want to grow. Through the evaluation cycle and the communication therein, the appraiser and educator both take greater responsibility in understanding and meeting established goals. Finally, at the end of the process, student growth is an indicator of a well-developed and integrated evaluation system. These are but a few of the many benefits reaped from an evaluation systems such as T-TESS (TEA,

The Principal and the governing body are accountable for the effective performance of the school and lead the development of staff to enable them to carry out their work. The Senior Leadership Team is made up of the Principal, Deputy Principal, three senior teachers and the School Business Manager. Together they have the responsibility of setting the strategic direction of the school and lead the school in managing this, as well as setting goals. There are three team leaders, each responsible for the teaching assistants, midday supervisors and estates team.

Aside from the administrative duties, educational leadership involves soliciting the cooperation and working with teachers to improve the pedagogic processes in their schools. Furthermore, this will require team effort from all the stakeholders to achieve these goals and adherences to the school’s mission and vision.

Each team lead should be responsible for their team, and each team should be held accountable for the risks involved in their department. They should be aware of the elements of the project they are responsible for delivering and make them accountable by holding review meetings each week to measure progress.

Effective leadership has been identified as a critical component for guiding school improvement; however, leaders who fail to establish a vision supported by thorough analysis of student performance data will be unlikely to focus instructional changes in critically needed areas.

Leadership roles are designed to initiate change quickly in a school district. The leadership team has answer to the community and stakeholders. The challenge for closing the achievement gaps is the responsibility of everyone. We all have a moral and legal responsibility for the future of education. As leaders we have an obligation to continue to ensure that all students are equally educated. Each identity of the education should share in closing the achievement gap. Teachers should reflect on their passion to teach.

Evaluations can be stressful for even the most veteran teacher. Providing new teachers with coaching support can ease this stress and anxiety of being observed and evaluated. Part of the evaluation process is being able to provide feedback that promotes effective instruction. This is an area that JD Parker is strategic about. Effective instruction is critical to student achievement, it is the expectation of administration that effective instruction be delivered continually. Two literacy coaches and one S.T.E.M. coach plan, support, and assist teachers with this component.

Teacher-leaders are well organized in their instructional planning paying a great deal attention to detail to their instruction and is very knowledgeable of their content. They have a wide range of roles and responsibilities. A highly effective school leader will recognize a teacher that is proficient in their instruction along detailed instructional planning and students who are constantly producing proficient results. Teacher- leader supplies a line of communication between administration and the teachers. They provide other important roles that are important to school improvement such as resource provider, classroom supporter, data coach, and mentor. The most important role that a teacher-leader will assume is of a learner. The teacher-leader is always looking ways to grow as an educator which will strengthen both professional and student

Educational organizations from this study may understand that there has been a general lack of conceptual clarity with regard to the formative assessment practices among stakeholders as a result of which, many apparently formative assessment tools and procedures have, in effect, been summative in nature that is assessment to gauge, at a particular point in time. Although the information gleaned from this type of assessment is important, it can only help in evaluating certain aspects of the teachers' abilities and skills but the point and purpose of this study is to implement peer observation strategy to ‘enhance’ rather than ‘measure’ professional learning.

Middle leaders are the driving force of improvement and consistency within schools (Toop, 2013). To ensure that excellence is being maintained throughout all classrooms and to therefore encourage and support new strategies, middle leaders need to be unified and focused, supporting each other with peer-to-peer development (Hargreaves, 2011). It is argued in the IPPR ‘Excellence and Equality’ report (Clifton ed., 2013) that the attainment gap found between students in school, will not be reduced unless there is focus upon a development of outstanding leadership. OFSTED (2014) also posed that the schools making the most significant progress for disadvantaged pupils were those that

Most principals and teachers would agree that our current teacher evaluation system is not helping teachers grow as educators. Many teachers agree that when they get evaluated, is at the end of the school year for end of the year evaluation. At that time, teachers are only thinking about summer and packing up the classroom. Even if they receive feedback, they are likely to put it off until next school year, which they hardly come back to and reflect. This current system doesn’t do a great job at actually providing feedback to and improving the instruction of students. It seems that each year, districts are working on improving the evaluation system and also include ways to access student learning. For example, our school district will start using student data from test scores as part of our evaluation. As teachers are now evaluated based on student test scores, one needs to take into account other factors. These factors include the following: class sizes, previous student teachers, have the students attended summer school, students peer culture, students’ abilities and health, and the test that is used to measure students. These are only a few factors to consider, as well as others.

Effective school leadership today must combine the traditional school leadership duties such as teacher evaluation, budgeting, scheduling, and facilities maintenance with a deep involvement with specific aspects of teaching and learning. Effective instructional leaders are intensely involved in curricular and instructional issues that directly affect student achievement (Cotton, 2003). The writer of this paper acknowledges that school principals should play the role of instructional leaders, not just a school manager. The reality is that are many demands on a principals time and management skills making it difficult for most of them to spend time in classrooms, when performing teacher evaluation. Principals often make sure that teachers

Drawing upon class activities, course materials and professional experiences explain why it is important for a school leader to demonstrate skills that promote teacher leadership functions focused on instructional proficiency and enable faculty and staff to work as a system focused on student learning. (2a, 7d)