Leadership team…how do you grow your teacher leaders? Three easy things to try!

One of my greatest focuses as a leader is to empower other leaders. From growing independence to fostering a culture of YES…I want our to have ownership of our school is run, to truly understand WHY we do what we do, and to genuinely think about what is best for our Wolves. That comes from LOTS and LOTS of conversations. It comes from giving situational autonomy to decision-making, and sometimes…hard questions when we reflect.

We have a separate leadership meeting before school starts each year. I have team leaders, who are typically handling things like field trip planning, important dates, team schematics, etc. We also have PLC leaders…these are my academic leaders who plan our PLCs and take the lead on data conversations during our formal PLC meetings each week. This meeting is where we come together as a leadership team. It is casual, but also a time where we establish our campus focus, drill down to our team focus, and even touch on each leader’s “leader” focus. Here are three things that we are going to do this year to help build our teacher leaders!

1. We’re going to create educational “TMYK” documents. These ” The More You Know” documents will be a tremendous resource for our new teachers.  We take a concept, term or literacy initiative and create a short click sheet/how-to for our team. Writing this forces us to do more research and understand it enough to explain it well to our teams.
2. Monday “Gaming Growth” sessions! I’m going to divide up all the weeks of the school year and have a leader share leadership strategies, TED talks, blog posts, tweets…anything that they feel would be of benefit to their team or our campus., It can even be an inspirational blurb! Because it’s not just me or our assistant principal, but our teachers of varying grades and experiences, too, we hope these shares are more engaging and impactful than if only led by “the” boss.
3. Personal Coaching– Hall-of-fame basketball coach Phil Jackson used to give his players books to read that were appropriate to them and their personality. He famously gave Kobe Bryant, “The Art of War.” You can do the same with your leaders. When you come across great content via book, blog, podcast, etc. relating to instructional strategies and leadership, send it their way and add it to your leadership agenda.

Here’s the agenda we’ll be using in August…to be finalized and determined closer to the date!

Leadership growN &