One of the opportunities I’ve been able to take on this year with George Couros is the #SAVMP collaboration project. Each week we post weekly updates to work with administrators and their team of mentees to help develop leadership and embrace the challenges that comes with the responsibility of leading. This week we discussed teacher leaders and I’m cross posting it here.
When thinking about ways to bring about change or attempting to cultivate something new for your campus, where do you begin? Do you start with a formal staff meeting? Where you stand in front of the group and tell them what you want to see happen?
How effective has the been?
Conversation at dinner last night talk centered around those rockstar teachers on your campus. The ones who are willing to go above and beyond because its what should be done for kids, not because they are getting paid to be there. When I think about some of the crazy ideas that I wanted to see happening in classrooms, I think about the teachers I went to talk with to make that happen. When I wanted to see a bulletin board focused on the digital tools happening in the classroom, I knew exactly where to go to make that happen. This teacher knew my expectations, knew my vision, and what my end goal was with the something as simple as a bulletin board. (Vision! It all come back to vision!) I also had to balance what was asked of this particular rockstar in order to not detract from her teaching, or her relationships amongst the staff. Todd Nesloney wrote an inspiring post about how he embraced that role on his campus.
Who are your teacher leaders? How are you lifting them up and empowering them to be an example without ostracizing them from the rest of your staff? Share your strategies with your mentees this week so they can start keeping an eye out for ways to embrace and lift up those around them.
Have a great week!
Amber
Great questions, Amber. Sometimes it may seem that the leader’s support of those teacher leaders is “favoritism,” even though your efforts to nurture their skills are indeed for the good of the organization. I shared a review of Scaling Up Excellence by Sutton and Rao here: http://lynhilt.postach.io/how-do-you-scale-up-excellence
They share so many great ideas about ways to move beyond pockets of excellence in our organizations!