Schools are places of incredible challenges and potentially innumerable rewards. Those rewards only come, though, when administrators, teachers, and students find a harmony that suits everyone but also pushes each just beyond comfortable and into the territory of calculated risk-taking. It is a risk to expand one's perspective to incorporate new modes of thought and nuance. It is a risk to try new pedagogy. It is a risk to up-end a curriculum design and shoot for a design one hasn't personally tested. Teacher leaders must provide the rationale and support that guide teachers into those risky areas strategically with the tools necessary to navigate the risk. Teacher leaders must also be ready to pull the floundering out of areas that aren't proving fruitful without negatively impacting morale
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This course showed me how to systematically analyze my school's current functioning and develop a vision for the future that resolves identified technology implementation roadblocks and increases equity for all students. I surveyed my colleagues to uncover those roadblocks and inequities, then developed a comprehensive SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis to serve as a rationale for change initiative discussion. I then developed an Action & Evaluation Plan that specified changes that would promote equity and increase student learning through technology-enhanced lesson planning and collaborative technology.
The alignment of this course with the Data Analysis course made me realize that my team as collaboration team lead was largely wasted - Had I known how to actually analyze the school's and our students' functioning, that time could have been more effectively utilized. I will take this knowledge with me into my many future collaboration sessions: truly effective and purposeful collaboration can be powerful for teaching and learning, and the strategies I learned here will prepare me to lead my team purposefully and, hopefully, much more effectively than before.