Leadership Matters - February 2013

Graduates talk about benefits of first ISAL As challenging as the times are in our profession, we are all looking to enhance our skill set. We seek advanced degrees, collaboration with colleagues, and issue-specific professional development. Two years ago, I was looking for all of those things and was blessed to find each piece all wrapped up in one experience: the IASA School for Advanced Leadership (ISAL). ISAL provided the opportunity to take various content and skills and apply them very specifically to my district and my own personal development. Too often, our professional growth is done with a general world view and misses the mark of focusing specifically on “our” issues. ISAL provided us the opportunity to selfishly focus on our individual district in combination with the unselfish sharing of support and ideas from colleagues throughout our state. Our success is in large part dictated by the capacity of those who are a part of our district team. ISAL provided knowledge, application and implication of various leadership strategies as well as facilitation strategies necessary to move our organization to a place of advanced opportunity. As a result of the ISAL experience, my board, my administrative team and I have all been challenged to look beyond the status quo, to challenge what is possible, and to commit to the long-term improvement of our profession. Gary Tipsord I completed ISAL as I was moving to my second superintendency after serving four years in my first superintendent position. I was able to bring the major areas of study and focus in ISAL to my second position -- in both my transition plan as well as strategic planning. ISAL gave me the ability to understand the difference between mentoring and coaching. The experience has allowed me to utilize a coaching model in my professional conversations with teachers and administrators and has been an invaluable leadership tool. Coaching a teacher or administrator leaves the person you are coaching walking away feeling empowered and provides that person with clarity to ideas and thoughts they have already formulated. The speakers for ISAL were outstanding! My favorite speaker was Dr. Tony Frontier on assessments and the necessity of an assessment plan to drive instruction and improve student achievement. I was able to bring Tony in to speak to my staff and parents on opening day this year to provide a greater understanding about common core, curriculum, assessments, and the mental framework necessary for our district to move forward toward understanding and continuous improvement. I learned that sometimes it is good for superintendent groups to have facilitators so they are not responsible for leading the discussion. So often we are responsible for facilitating and overseeing professional discussions that we really aren’t able to sit back and truly listen and reflect what our colleagues are sharing. Superintendents then gain a better understanding of what a great learning community ISAL represents! Dr. Jean Sophie I applied to be part of ISAL because I wanted to model continued professional development for my faculty and staff. In my mind, I could use this experience to assist with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards in our district. However, I received that content and so much more, both professionally and personally, from the experience. On a professional level, ISAL inspired me to begin a collaborative administrative group that meets monthly to focus on CCSS/PARCC implementation. This group consists of Benton Consolidated High School, our three feeder schools and a small neighboring district. We worked with Dr. Anthony Frontier on using the Understanding by Design (UbD) curriculum model to develop instructional units aligned to the CCSS. On the opening day of school, all K-12 teachers were together for an overview of CCSS and UbD. I was told that it had been over 20 years since all the districts had been together for training. Looking out on the 150 or so teachers, I was awed by the sight that symbolized the (Continued on page 8) Dr. Kelly Stewart

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