Standard Seven: MICROPOLITICAL LEADERSHIP
The school executive will build systems and relationships that utilize the staff's diversity, encourage constructive ideological conflict in order to leverage the school's vision for success. The executive will also creatively employ an awareness of staff members' professional needs, issues, and interests to build social cohesion and to facilitate distributed governance and shared decision-making.
A. School Executive MicroPolitical Leadership
At the beginning of the 2019-20 school year, Fuller's School Improvement Team identified equity as an area of need when analyzing student achievement data and staff feedback. Specific work in racial equity began during but did not completely get off the ground due to the pandemic. I was tasked to restart the Equity/Diversity Team, which had their kick-off meeting in September 2020. During the meeting, I facilitated staff learning around the differences between equity and equality, reviewed school data, began to identify specific equity challenges, and reflected on the misalignment of staff intentions and actions that have created inequitable school environments.
Throughout the 2020-21 school year, the newly formed Equity/Diversity Team met at least once a month discussing race, identity, culture, implicit bias, and building a classroom community. The team worked to define its purpose and goals for the upcoming school year and beyond. Ultimately, the team members will take their learning (and unlearning) back to the whole staff to build cohesion around the school community's values and beliefs. |
(Restricted) The NCSU course requirement to collect information for a human capital table enabled me to better understand the experiences of each staff member at Fuller Elementary. Fuller's staff vary in life experiences, teaching experiences, areas of certification, and years worked at the school. Just this school year, Fuller said goodbye for different reasons to three staff members and welcomed seven new staff members. School administration collaborated with the Climate Committee to find creative ways throughout the school year to provide methods for intentional relationship building among the diverse staff.
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Toward the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, the Fuller's administration team had the privilege of selecting, interviewing, and filling four instructional assistant positions. Once they were hired, I created an instructional assistant onboarding document outlining the frequently-used applications and sites, needed training, and important documents to review. I also paired the newly hired instructional assistants with seasoned instructional assistants to acclimate the new staff to Fuller.
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Throughout the 2020-21 school year, I kept a daily activity log that shows the variety of experiences I had leveraging staff expertise to make school-based decisions. I collaborated with the School Improvement Team and the various committees, Intervention Team, PTA, school specialists, Equity/Diversity Team members, and families on countless occasions to align impactful decisions and help build school cohesion.
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