Principal JL is an educational leader who explores various topics facing educational leaders today! The Mission of this podcast is to inform and inspire other Educational Leaders on how to be their best for their Schools by honing their skills and talents so they may impact their teachers, staff members, students, parents/guardians, and community members positively for their School District! Come with a Growth Mindset as we journey through Educational Leadership!
Ever wondered how collaborative efforts can truly transform a school environment? In this episode, I share invaluable strategies from my own journey as both a rural and larger school principal. Discover how forming a diverse school improvement team is not just beneficial but essential. We'll explore actionable steps to include everyone from principals to staff members, and delve into the critical importance of creating a respectful and solution-oriented space where concerns like chronic absenteeism can be tackled head-on.
As we shift gears, join me in expressing heartfelt gratitude to the dedicated school improvement team that has worked tirelessly over the past two years. We celebrate the incredible progress made and look forward with excitement to future goals. This episode is a tribute to the power of collaboration and the promising path ahead, filled with optimism and appreciation for the collective commitment to bettering our school community. Don't miss this opportunity to be inspired and motivated by the fantastic strides we've made together!
Episode 7, leading Change in your School. Hey everybody, this is Principal JL Today's topic. I wanted to talk about leading change in your school. When you are creating change in a school, it is not easy. It takes everybody involved to lead that change. I don't know if I've met any principal or leader that has been able to create change by themselves. Now you can do it. I don't know if that would be something I would advise you on. I don't know if that would be something I would advise you on. So today's episode is going to be dedicated towards leading change and understand that educational leaders cannot do this alone. They need a group of people working together that are creating positive change for the betterment of the school. The number one thing you got to think about is will this change benefit the staff, the students, everybody involved? And then how is it going to benefit? Because, in the end, the people that have to lead the change isn't the principal. It's actually the teachers and the staff members that are involved, and that's the little secret I want to talk to you guys about today.
Speaker 1:
Leading change can happen in any size of school. It doesn't matter if you're a small school principal or a large school principal. The method I'm going to talk about today is using a school improvement team to create those changes. I have been both a rural school principal and a larger school principal, so I've done both and I've been able to work with a great group of teachers during my two principalships. The great thing is is I was able just to provide a space for the teachers and staff to voice their concerns and to be able to find attainable solutions to the issues that we are facing. Now, issues from one school to the next can be different, but I'm going to bet a lot of our issues that we're seeing in schools today are not just unique to your school, but it is something that's across the nation Like let's take example, apteism. It's a huge problem. You know a lot of schools are battling chronic apteism. How do you create change to help that A lot of schools are looking at? You know just a lot of different changes. So when it comes down to it, it takes a group of people to create these change. So what I'm going to talk to you guys about it's not the only method of doing it, but it is a method I found that's very effective, productive and creates the change needed so you guys can move forward.
Speaker 1:
When you are talking about a school improvement team, what does that look like? Well, the one thing I did is, on the school improvement team, I invited people. I invited all staff members, all teachers, my principals, everybody to be a part of this school improvement team, to be a part of this school improvement team. Now, the best part about that is no one can say I was never invited to be a part of that team, and you'll be amazed how many people want to be a part of that school improvement team and want to affect and create change.
Speaker 1:
The one thing you got to do is you got to have the school improvement team. You got to get people committed. So here's a general idea of who you can have on your school improvement team. You got to get people committed. So here's a general idea of who you can have on your school improvement team. Of course, the principal, assistant principals, if you have them. Athletic directors, if you have them. Sometimes the AP and athletic directors. Same Teachers, staff members, anybody that is wanting to be a part of the change in the school.
Speaker 1:
Now what you need to do is you need to create time for that team. You got to create that dedicated time, what I did at a small rural school. We dedicated time differently than I did at the larger school that I'm at right now. The best way I've found to do that is I have dedicated time within the teacher work day or the professional development days, where there's no kids in school, but we can have times or we could have a time set aside to have those meetings, and we try to keep them to an hour because we don't want to go too crazy with them. But we'll meet several times throughout the year. Usually, the first meeting is about hey, what's the problem we want to solve for this year? And then we talk about how we're going to solve that. So what does that look like?
Speaker 1:
Well, when you're a professional development team, the main goal is to be able to give your staff members a voice, give them a place that they can come and talk to the administration as a team and say, hey, this is really bugging us, this is something that we would really like to change, but we're not sure how to do that, and that's where the team comes together. So the first thing is is you want to give them a safe space for them to voice those concerns. Then you want to start looking for solutions, there's three norms that you can utilize within your school improvement team. Number one be respectful of each other. Like everybody needs to respect each other's opinions, no matter if you disagree or agree with them. Hey, I can see your point, but this is how I see it, because content teachers from different areas have different point of views, and the beauty of the school improvement team is, if you have content teachers from different content you have music teachers, you have SPED teachers, you have English teachers, math teachers, science teachers, art teachers you have them in the same room. They can talk about. Hey, this is how I see it. Oh, I never saw it that way. You know, they have those good conversations to where they can understand each other and be able to move forward.
Speaker 1:
And then the last thing is to find solutions. I want the team to be solution oriented, because if you just sit in there and have a bitch session all the time, you're not going to be productive, and so when you want to look at finding solutions, you want to find things that you can maybe research, maybe find some solutions within that research, but you want those decisions that you make in your school improvement team to be data-driven decisions. And then this is the best part about the school improvement team they are going to help you implement those changes as a school principal. Yeah, you're going to help them, you're going to get them together, we're going to create these changes together, but then you empower them by having them help you drive the change, and so one of the things we did so, within my first year of the principalship that I'm currently in, we were able to have three successes with our school improvement team we're able to implement a hall monitor, we were able to implement e-hall pass and we were able to implement a new electronic policy.
Speaker 1:
Now, this was something that we worked on in my first year and then we implemented in my second year. Therefore, with these new changes, the school improvement team were the people that were driving the implementation. So what I ended up doing is I had some school improvement team members present the information the school improvement team created to all the staff, and then the staff was able to ask questions. Of course, I was there. My assistant principals were there. We're talking about the solutions that were brought up and the changes that were being made.
Speaker 1:
The coolest part was watching the team be able to present that information to their peers and then watching the peers respond to that. That was really powerful, because you have your teachers and staff driving the change. As a principal, you're there to help support them and you help them create those changes, but you're also there to guide them when it comes down to. You know, is this solution data-driven based? Is it something that's attainable? Is this something that we can have fidelity on? And so, with those three implementations, with the new hall monitor, the e-hall pass system and the new electronic policy, we had to explain to people that we had to be very tight on this. These are things we decided as a team and the nice thing about those implementation over the last year I did a survey. 90% of the teachers approved of those 3D changes and a lot of that is because the school improvement team was the team that created those solutions and they're the one driving those solutions. So, as a principal, you don't have to do it all, you don't have to be the one driving a change, but you're the one with the vision. You're the one like hey, you see how the overall big picture, but your goal is to get people together to collaborate so you can drive and implement change.
Speaker 1:
This last year, the school improvement team did something that really was amazing. Now this all is a collective effort, because even the assistant principal in this situation was the one that brought the information to the school improvement team, because something that we've been talking about is attendance and how. Attendance is not good. It's not where we want it. How can we improve it? Our current practices aren't helping. Teachers are frustrated because they're upset that kids aren't in class, so the school improvement team was very passionate about this topic. Well, our assistant principal came back from administrator days with information about a possible solution to our attendance and how we can increase or improve our daily average attendance and decrease our chronic apneism. That was what we just went over this last year working on, and we met probably four or five times throughout the year to create these solutions.
Speaker 1:
And the great part about this is the school improvement team was able to get the information together. We created it. We're able to take it to the district office, present it to our superintendent. Superintendent and district office got on board and then they took it to the school board and now the attendance policy has been passed by the school board that we're going to use for the 24-25 school year. That is not possible without a great staff to work with and without people on the school improvement team leading change. Now the next step, of course, is going to be implementation, and that's where everybody that was involved with is going to help drive that change. So I'm really, really excited to see how the new attendance policy will work and address the apteism that we're currently dealing with.
Speaker 1:
So, overall, today's topic is about creating change, and I want to provide you guys with one attainable way to do that, which I find is very easy and quick to do, is to create that school improvement team. The number one thing you got to do is you got to make sure you get people on that team that are from different areas, different areas Don't just have people from one content area, but have people from different content areas so everybody can have a voice within the process. I was lucky enough to have, I think, at least one person from every department on the school improvement team, and that was amazing because everybody got their voice heard within that, Because a lot of times, these people can go back to their departments and talk about hey, this is what we're talking about. What are some things you guys think you could do, what are some things you could bring to the table? Then they would come back and say, hey, here's some concerns our departments have about what we're talking about and we can address those concerns. Things you want to do to make sure you're successful with setting up a school improvement team is you want to create a dedicated time for them to meet. You want to be able to have a lot of different people from different content areas be involved in that process, including the assistant principals, the ADs and the principal as well within that team.
Speaker 1:
Finally, I want to give a shout out to my school improvement team. Thank you, guys, for all the hard work you guys have done over the past two years that we've worked together. There's a lot of great things happening within our school building and I'm excited to see what the future holds. Well, that's all I have for today. This was a short one, but I felt like it was a good one because it was something I just wanted to talk to you guys about. When it talks about creating change in your school, until next time, lead the change.
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