Standard Four: Human Resource Leadership
Principals/assistant principals will ensure that the school is a professional learning community. Principals/assistant principals will ensure that process and systems are in place which results in recruitment, induction, support, evaluation, development and retention of high performing staff. The principal/assistant principal must engage and empower accomplished teachers in a distributive manner, including support of teachers in day-to-day decisions such as discipline, communication with parents/ guardians, and protecting teachers from duties that interfere with teaching, and must practice fair and consistent evaluations of teachers. The principal/assistant principal must engage teachers and other professional staff in conversations to plan their career paths and support district succession planning
Element IVa. Professional Development/Learning Communities: The principal/assistant principal ensures that the school is a professional learning community
Action: At Speight, we have grade level PLCs (IT Chats) on Mondays. In these meetings, teachers analyze formative and summative data from common assessments, Case 21, and universal screener benchmarks. They work together to devise intervention and reteaching plans. I have participate in these meetings and support the teachers in the implementation of these strategies. Below are the minutes from a very productive PLC day at the beginning of the year. I took the minutes for this session.
PLC Minutes
Action: At Speight, we also have Collaborative Planning on Thursdays. Each week, to help facilitate cross-curricular planning, teachers complete a chart on a whiteboard with their lesson focus for the week so that all teachers from all subjects and grades know what is being taught throughout the school. Teachers share instructional strategies and plan together. Below is a picture of the whiteboard from a collaborative planning session that I facilitated.
Collaborative Planning Chart
Element IVb. Recruiting, Hiring, Placing and Mentoring of staff: The principal/assistant principal establishes processes and systems in order to ensure a high-quality, high-performing staff.
Action: I attended the Wilson County Job Fair at Darden Middle School on March 17. I arrived early and set up the Speight table. I created a slide show to highlight the great things going on at Speight. We interviewed a teacher for a science position, and she signed a contract to start in August.
Wilson County Job Fair
Action: I have coached a few beginning teachers throughout the year. I have helped one teacher with classroom management, one with instructional strategies, and one with making sure that all students are engaged. Below is a classroom management plan for how to begin class that I developed to help a beginning teacher who was struggling.
Coaching Plan for Beginning Teacher
Element IVc. Teacher and Staff Evaluation: The principal/assistant principal evaluates teachers and other staff in a fair and equitable manner with the focus on improving performance and, thus, student achievement.
Action: I conducted observations and post-conferences with several teachers using the Rubric for Evaluating North Carolina Teachers. For NCLA, we tracked our monthly observations using an Evaluation Log. Below is January's Log and a teacher's Observation.