The Gritty Truth of School Transformation by Amy Dujon

Author:Amy Dujon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Learning Sciences International
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Leveraging New Leaders

Once again, it was time to examine my teacher teams in light of budget allocations. But this year, as I walked classrooms gearing up to make strategic teacher moves, my gut wasn’t telling me something was missing. On the contrary, I had an overwhelming sense of purpose and pride. My moves would be focusing on preparing teacher teams to take over the learning, to make the movement teacher-owned and teacher-driven. Unlike any previous year I had experienced, I was making moves as a true instructional leader.

Out of the work, new leaders will emerge. These new leaders may be teachers who have escaped your radar. But you will easily recognize these new leaders, because they will be among the coalition. They will work to make themselves and those around them better, opening their classroom doors and willingly sharing their practices so others may learn and grow alongside them. They are risk-takers who have embodied the new vision of instruction.

Remembering my goal to get to 100 percent of teachers on board and to shift the project from leader-driven to teacher-driven, balancing teacher teams now took on new meaning. I had learned what it meant to monitor evidence, and just as my teachers were monitoring student evidence, I was monitoring teacher evidence. To get to all teachers, I restructured grade-level teams based on implementation and student performance data. Each grade level would consist of at least one teacher grounded in the work (an early adopter), at least one teacher who was emerging in the work (a mid-adopter), and then a balance of late adopters and resisters. This approach was modeled from teacher practices with student teams. When teachers in classrooms wanted to dig deeper into the content, they created purposeful, heterogeneous student groups. Grouping teachers by varied abilities enabled me to have enough drivers on each team to keep moving forward.

One strategic teacher move was to take a first follower from a highly functional team and move her to another grade level as team leader. This teacher had formed a deep bond with her team, and I watched as her implementation prompted more teachers on her team to engage in the work. As a result, the team was soaring. This teacher, while not a team leader at the time, was guiding planning, sharing practice, and remaining passionate about the work. I pulled her aside and talked to her about my plans to move her into a leadership position. She didn’t say much at first, but the next day, she was in tears. “I hope you know what you are doing,” she said to me. I looked at her and asked if she trusted me and believed in her instruction. She nodded, and I reassured her. I needed her to lead the work, to be the “lone nut.” I knew without a doubt what I was doing, and her faith in me to make decisions based on what was right for the kids and her peers reaffirmed just how far we had come and how much we had grown together.

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