Standard 4: Human Resource Leadership
School executives will ensure that the school is a professional learning community. School executives will ensure that processes and systems are in place which result in recruitment, induction, support, evaluation, development, and retention of high performing staff. The school executive 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 school executive must engage teachers and other professional staff in conversations to plan their career paths and support district succession planning.
Element 4A. Professional Development/Learning Communities
The school executive ensures that the school is a professional learning community.
The school executive ensures that the school is a professional learning community.
Weekly Professional Learning Communities (PLCs): It is imperative that staff members are able to engage in conversations about student data and best instructional practices to improve teaching and learning in the classrooms. Each week, all instructional staff members participate in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) led by the department leads and instructional leadership. As the instructional leader for the social studies department, I led the team in disaggregating student data, sharing best practices for social studies, developing unit and lesson plans, and created specific professional development as requested. I created the weekly PLC agendas for the meetings and ensured that each team member had a role. To the right is an example of the meeting minutes.
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Content-Specific Professional Development: This school-year, each EOC/NCFE tested content area was allotted funds to attend one professional development conference. These conferences had to be approved by the administrative team to include a description of the conference and relevance to content-specific instruction. This allowed teachers the opportunity to learn from others around the state as well as develop a close bond to one other. I ensured that each department completed their prior approval forms and submitted all necessary documents prior to attending their conferences. To the right is a photo of the social studies department attending the North Carolina Social Studies Conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. Two of the four teachers pictured had the honor of presenting at the conference!
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Element 4B. Recruiting, Hiring, Placing and Mentoring of Staff
The school executive establishes processes and systems in order to ensure a high-quality, high-performing staff.
The school executive establishes processes and systems in order to ensure a high-quality, high-performing staff.
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Behavioral Interviews: This year, I conducted Behavioral Interviews for candidates seeks to serve at NEHS with the interview committee. These interviews were designed to help the interview committee assess candidate's behaviors as they told short stories to answer questions asked during the interview process. The responses gave the interview committee an idea of how candidates would interact with others and view challenges based on their responses surrounding previous experiences. This process allowed us to select the best candidate to fill essential roles for student success. To the left is a copy of the Behavioral Interview Questionnaire used for the interviewing process.
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Element 4C. Teacher and Staff Evaluation
The school executive evaluates teachers and other staff in a fair and equitable manner with the focus on improving performance and, thus, student achievement.
The school executive evaluates teachers and other staff in a fair and equitable manner with the focus on improving performance and, thus, student achievement.
NEHS Observation Tracker: To organize feedback and action steps given to teachers during the school year, it was imperative to create an observation tracker that captured the instructional goals of the teacher as well as the key lever, or high leverage action steps, teachers should be using to increase student achievement. I developed the observation tracker on the right with other members of the Instructional Leadership Team. Together, we included our comments for individual teachers weekly to ensure that teachers were receiving constant feedback and that the feedback was constructive and aligned with their individual instructional goals.
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Summative Data Organization: To prepare for summative evaluation meetings at the end of the year, the administrative team sought to organize individual teacher's data in a clear, objective manner. I worked alongside my mentor principal to create the summative data template to capture this data. This tracker (pictured on the left) tracked what rating teachers received during their observations and the amount of times they received that rating. This ensured that we were including the most accurate data for each teacher as well as organizing their data in a timely manner.
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