Two weeks ago, the participating LeadScape principals met in Seattle, Washington for a week of professional learning, engaging with a variety of topics including school-wide instructional design, scheduling support for inclusive classrooms, school-wide Positive Behavior Supports, and student voice. To supplement their learning, we invited nationally recognized experts to provide information about the implementation of these new practices, the usage of data for decision making, and the importance of attending to all of the aspects of systemic change. It was exciting to watch the principals encounter so many new ideas and new practices, but, for me, the most important element of the week was the collaboration of talented, diverse, committed principals.
As school leaders, principals often work in isolation or are positioned as “lone deciders.” When they do meet together in district groups, they often have very specific agendas that restrict opportunities for discussion. I’ve found that as we’ve worked with this group of principals over time, they’ve engaged in deeper and more difficult complex discussions and planning each time we meet.
Our first meeting was a year ago in Denver, Colorado, and during that time we shared a set of LeadScape beliefs and goals that focused on an equity agenda for access, participation, and opportunity to learn for ALL students. To do this work requires transformation in classroom practices and in the structures and organizational patterns that schools use to manage their people, practices, and policies. Schools offer both hidden and explicit curricula that are based on assumptions about students, families, and learning. These hidden assumptions maintain the way that schools have been traditionally run. If we want to improve opportunities, equity, access, and learning for every student, we have to look at our data and our results as opportunities to focus on making sure that every student benefits from our practice.
After that first meeting, Elizabeth and I got to know each of the principals individually during site visits in the fall of 2007, and when we all got together again in January of 2008 there was a stronger group identity. At that Institute we visited some Arizona schools, examined the cultures in school and how the cultures of both teachers and students contribute to disproportionate representation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education. Most importantly, we were able to engage in frank conversations about inclusive practices that we had tried with varying degrees of success, and it seemed to me that we finally began to gel as a community of practice of like-minded people.
This summer’s Institute felt more like a family reunion! We caught up with each other, shared successes and struggles, welcomed new additions, and felt comfortable enough to grapple with the hard issues of how to transform practices in our schools in a substantive way. In groups and individually, people started finding ways to move their school’s transformation process to a deeper level, whether it was through PBS, redesigning service delivery models, expanding co-teaching, or focusing professional learning for inclusive practices.
I think it’s important that we nurture this community of practice so that we can support each other all year round, not just at the Institutes. This group can provide great support for one another, whether it’s the new principals engaging in ongoing dialogues about their transition processes, middle school principals from different states comparing support models, or individual principals sharing resources and successes with each other. Let’s keep up the dialogue!
I’d love to get some ideas from you LeadScape principals on ways you’d like to keep connected. Whether it’s posting informal blog entries, sending out a monthly newsletter, or setting up periodic conference calls, it’s not so much about the content of the connection as it is about providing the most useful medium to generate an ongoing interaction that can support your individual work.
This group is a unique collection of bright, driven school leaders who are all working in different environments toward a common goal: improving opportunities, equity, and access for ALL of the students in our schools. We need to find ways to stay connected with one another throughout the year to fuel our motivation and share ideas.
Author Biography: Elaine Mulligan is currently the project coordinator for the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI), the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt), and the NIUSI-LeadScape principal leadership academy initiative. Elaine has had extensive experience as a classroom teacher, has served as education coordinator for a private residential treatment facility, and has worked directly with adolescents in residential treatment. She has also worked in a variety of different cultural environments including student teaching in Portslade, England; working as an itinerant teacher in the Peace Corps in St. Lucia, West Indies; and teaching resource students on the Gila River Pima-Maricopa Reservation in Bapchule, Arizona. Elaine is currently finishing a Master of Arts in Special Education at Arizona State University, focusing on Multicultural Exceptionalities.