ATLA 3.0

Cohort 10: An Introduction to the Teacher Leadership Framework

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August 9, 2019

Introductions

CSTP: Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession

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2019-20 Cadre Leaders

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• Ryan Dunham - Rainier MS
• Michael Fitzgerald - Elem TOSA
• Jessica Lee - AMHS
• Stephanie Cornejo - AMHS
• Jill Woodruff - Alpac

Remembering Our Why

ATLA Origin & Premise

2019-20 ATLA Goals

Auburn Teacher Leadership Academy 3.0 is designed to provide teacher leaders with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to provide culturally responsive instruction that honors each student’s identity while preparing them for success after high school. In support of the district's strategic plan, Cohort 10 seeks teacher leaders who will help us make our beliefs actionable: We believe culturally responsive teaching supports equity, excellence, and achievement for all students.

Feedback Data from ATLA Pre-assessment

Highest:

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3.88 I believe I can grow and change.

3.80 I value professional expertise and experience of group members.

3.78 I believe that my social and emotional growth impacts my work.

3.78 I take an ethical stance and support others in operating from an ethical perspective.

3.76 I advocate for equity of access/opportunity and outcomes for all students.

Feedback Data from ATLA Pre-assessment

Lowest:

2.93 I am able to mediate conversations around sensitive topics without shutting people down.

2.73 I create environments and activities that encourage adult learners to question their assumptions.

2.93 I understand how intersectionality is necessary for equity across all oppressed groups.

2.95 I understand and manage resistance as a legitimate element of working within a system.

2.78 I synthesize, summarize and use mediation to move large or small groups to decisions.

2.93 I foster adult learners’ engagement in order to maximize opportunities to learn.

ATLA 3.0 Participants Will...

• Participate in professional development to enhance culturally responsive classroom- and school-management strategies.
• Apply practices that reflect a growth-mindset in the belief that each student can achieve at high levels.
• Consider the CSTP Teacher Leadership Framework, particularly its Equity Lens, to elevate advocacy for equity of access, opportunities, and outcomes for students.
• Contribute to their school’s plans and efforts to provide culturally responsive teaching for students.

Framework Session Goals

1. Become familiar with a variety of roles as a teacher leader
2. Develop teacher leader capacity (TL Framework) and become familiar with the knowledge, skills and dispositions of an effective teacher leader
3. Learn a variety of Protocols/Tools to use with both students and adults

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ATLA Journal

1. Create your ATLA 3.0 Journal
2. First entry: Reflect on a learning experience from the past two days that you hope to share with others in your school or will impact your teaching. What about the experience made you want to share it? Are there any hurdles to sharing the experience with others?

With your table group, what are some roles you serve as a “teacher leader”?

Ten Roles of Teacher Leaders

1. Resource Provider
2. Instructional Specialist
3. Curriculum Specialist
4. Classroom Supporter
5. Learning Facilitator
6. Mentor
7. School Leader
8. Data Coach
9. Catalyst of Change
10. Learner

Source:

Ten Roles Gallery Walk

• Read the ten roles of teacher leaders
• Get 3 sticky notes
• the top role that resonates with you as a teacher leader
• the top role that relates with you around equity leadership
• the one that you relate least with
• Stand up and move to your #1 role

Round 1 - Move to Your #1 Role

What about this role resonates with you and how can you utilize this strength to help others?

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Round 2 - Move to Your #2 Role

What about this role resonates with you and how can you utilize this strength to help others in their capacity to use culturally responsive teaching practices in the classroom?

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Round 3 - Move to Your #3 Role

What about this role does not resonate with you and what is one small step (Kaizen method) that might challenge your leadership capacity in this role to advance culturally responsive teaching practices at your school?

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Journal Prompt #2

What are your takeaways from the 10 roles activity? Were there roles that you have had that you were surprised fall into a teacher leadership category?

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Reflect on the role that resonated

the least with you from gallery

walk -- how could you improve?

Ten-Minute Break

Please be prepared for new seats when you return

New Seating

Please make sure there are six people at your table.

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We may end up having a table or two of seven, but we need at least six people per table.

CSTP’s Teacher Leadership Framework Activity

Within your groups of six, please have each person choose one of these six topics from the Teacher Leadership Framework:

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Click on this Teacher Leader Framework link. Read the first two pages of background information, then find your assigned component of the framework and read those pages as well.

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Then click on this link and find a space on the slides assigned to your topic. Complete the See, Think Wonder activity for your part of the TLF. Finally, we will share out with our table groups.

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Journal Entry #3

• How could use the protocol “See Think Wonder” with your adult learners or even in your classroom?

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• Having learned about the framework,

what is a knowledge, skill or disposition in which you excel?

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• What is one that you’d like to improve

upon?

Practicing Active Listening within Equity Conversations

Why Paraphrase?

A way to create a space and place for thinking and reflection for the speaker.

• Shorter than the original telling
• In your own words.

Types of Paraphrasing

Summarize & Organize

Acknowledge & Clarify

Paraphrasing Prompts

Acknowledge & Clarify

So, you’re wondering if….

You’re noticing….

You’re thinking that….

Could you tell me more about….

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Summarize & Organize

You have a couple areas of concern….

On one hand…, and on the other hand….

So, there are three big categories….

Your sequence or hierarchy seems to be….

Why use Questioning?

What’s a question that really needs asking?

Real - You don’t know the answer to it.

Honest - Not advice hiding as a question.

Open-ended - Not a yes/no answer.

Prompts for thinking - Not descriptive, research, or retelling.

Model coaching conversation

When you think about leading with culturally responsive practices, what are your hopes and fears?

What tool did you notice the listener using to invite and support his/her colleague’s thinking?

When did you notice the speaker’s thinking deepening, extending, moving?

Lunch: One Hour

Welcome Back!

Please sit with your �school groups.

Triad Breakdown

Guiding Question:

When you think about leading with culturally responsive practices, what are your hopes and fears?

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Predictable Group Dynamics Activity

Individual and collective comfort and discomfort related to completing tasks, making decisions, and engaging in conflict

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Guide yourself where you feel most comfortable within various contexts

Task Oriented Relationship

Group member’s work style preferences range from a strong focus on task completion to a strong desire for inclusion and colleagueship. The press to balance efficiency with the need to include all voices produces tension in groups. Conflicting values for attention to task and patience with process cause friction limit productivity and reduce the group’s ability to function as a group. We struggle with this dichotomy, particularly when time is tight. Yet, without a unified voice and shared decisions, school improvement processes bog down in implementation.

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Certainty Ambiguity

Individual group members vary dramatically in their need for surety before moving forward with plans of action. For some, a lack of clear and precise definitions, rules and steps in a process halts progress. However, in both planning and implementation, comfort with some degree of ambiguity is essential for initiatives to move forward. When this tension is polarized, groups get stuck and lose momentum.

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Detail Big Picture

A focus on the specifics of projects and plans is a source of comfort for some group members, while for others a wider and longer-term view energizes their work. Wide ranges in this dimension of work style preference. While each of these perspectives adds value to group work, tensions emerge when working styles conflict. While the big picture preference can cause impatience with the need for specifics, it is these specifics that are the stepping-stones in a final plan. Those who prefer details can feel lost in navigating the big picture, yet a vision of larger view is necessary to inspire movement and to launch direction.

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Autonomy Collaboration

Traditionally, schools are structured for autonomy. Schedules, reward systems and even the physical plant curtail opportunities for shared professional exchange. We have a limited history and limited skills with collaborative examination of teaching and learning practices. The desire for and habits of individualism reduces the potential for collaboration. Individual practitioners who are territorial about their curriculum and instructional practices and other areas of expertise may have difficulty aligning their thinking to engage in shared decisions and in aligning their work to produce the gains of cumulative effect.

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Four Tensions in Adult Learning Dynamics

• Task vs Relationship
• Certainty vs Ambiguity
• Detail vs Big Picture
• Autonomy vs Collaboration

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How might these dynamics affect

how you lead in some of those

ten leadership roles?

Journal Entry #4

How might this activity be powerful or insightful to bring back to your group or school?

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What skills and knowledge might you develop to be more effective in leading adult learners in leaning into courageous conversations?

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In what ways might you need to adapt your communication skills to be a more effective leader...especially as an equity leader?

Seven-Minute Break

What and Why Systems Thinking

Why:

to get what your students need

What:

the way the organization works

Knowledge and Skills

- Deal effectively with resistance

- Understand power structure and decision making in context

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Dispositions

- focus on “big picture”

- embraces opportunities to work with diverse views

- ability to “read” people and situations

Stages of Organizational Growth

• Grab a handout of this graphic
• Read through each of the five stages
• For each of these stages, consider where your school is at… template to record evidence of the stages (different components can be in different stages)

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Systems Thinking

ST-2

ST-3

ST-4

Journal Entry #5 - Systems Thinking

Locate Systems Thinking Framework

• Where did you rate your Stage of Organization when considering your self/school?
• Make a connection to the framework
1. What knowledge, skills or dispositions might you improve on to get a different score
2. Set 1-3 goals (individual, grade level or department and school) for this year related to improving your score on the Stage of Organization work.

Moving forward...

• Apply culturally responsive practice(s) learned
• Practice listening deeply to build relationships with staff and students
• Continue principal conversation to identify potential entry points for your building

Hopes Fears

• Equity does not get lost in all the other things
• We need time
• Incorporate AVID strategies
• Transfer our listening skills
• Everyone in the building embraces building relationships with students and staff
• This impacts individual kids
• We can go as far as we need to for as long as we need to to make a systemic change
• Every child and family feels like they have a voice in the school
• The adults are courageous when they recieve pushback
• Little steps are ok
• We all hold each other accountable
• Every school has an equity team

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• Administration doesn’t/can’t walk the talk
• Lack of truly authentic student voice
• What happens if we don’t do the work?
• Whitewashing or appropriating another person’s culture/being sensitive enough to highlight someone else’s culture in an appropriate way
• People denying that we need this
• The work will fizzle and/or get lost
• That we won’t be taken seriously as we try to do this work because of our backgrounds (race, age, years of experience in teaching, etc.)

Planning for your Principal

1. How will you be applying what you’ve learned in your classroom? What support do you want from your principal?
2. What hopes and fears does the principal have for building culturally responsive practices in the building?
3. What content from the week can we be thinking about to take back to staff?

Feedback

ATLA 3.0 August Feedback Survey

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Clock Hour Evaluation Form

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