My leadership roles

While reading the preface and chapter one of How to Thrive as a Teacher Leader I felt as though my principal could have written it. She is very encouraging to her staff and allows us to "take the reins" when we feel we can. She also empowers us by creating a number of different committees that we can be a part off to create a sense of community, purpose and drive.

In my own building I would have to say I have a couple of leadership roles. First, I am on the team leaders committee. This committee is a group of teachers that gathers to discuss, problems solve and communicate for the entire school. We meet regularly with our principle, tech dept. and other administrators. We have also gone to a number of leadership conferences. Another leadership role I have is that I am "chair person" for our district art department. I go to our articulation meetings with the high school and other feeder schools (we are a k-8 district) and set up art shows for the community. In just this last year, I have also become an instructional leader for my building. We have been undergoing a big shift in our instructional process and have had the pleasure of working with Jane E Pollock. The instructional leaders are teachers that have attended a special summer workshop last year and are implementing Pollock's GANAG instruction in our classroom regularly. We are working with our colleagues and helping (coaching) them on ways to improve instruction by using the GANAG process.

I also served on the team communicators, a group that voluntarily meets every wednesday before school to "hash" out management type issues and relay information between teams for better school wide communication. We then email the entire school and other the administrators the minutes so everyone is up-to-date!