Leadership+and+Supervision

Leadership and Supervision

1) Introductions 2) Icebreaker. Head Bands: Each person is dealt a card face down, they do not look at it. They hold it up on their forehead face out. With out speaking they put them selves in order by suit. Hearts 1-Kin as an example. During the debrief you talk about strategies and how did they do it. In most cases a leader starts sorting using non verbal communication. This task is impossible to complete if you are not working together as a team.
 * Day One**

3) Learning Styles Inventory. How do you learn best?

There are several online Learning Style Inventories. Here are a few links. @http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=questionnaire

This was followed up by doing a pie chart of learning styles. The group was then sorted into like group were assigned to teach the group three things about a school using the groups learning style. We had songs, charts and graphs, pictures, maps and role playing.

The exit ticket was "What do you want to learn in the two weeks?"


 * Day Two**

Mrs. Walter started the day with Ministry of Education Reports, as I was doing an interview at the radio station.

When I returned we started with a Jigsaw activity on Learning styles. We used this reading. @http://allthedifference.org/rightcol1/overview-of-learning/ Divided into groups, selected which learning styles each person would become an "Expert" on. Then split into "Expert" groups, did the reading and decided how they were going to do the teaching. Returned to "Home" groups and taught the learning style.

A description of the Jigsaw can be found in this handout. Workshop Facilitation

Then we did a Brainstorming activity on "What are the Responsibilities of Principals?" Each participant was given two post-it-notes and asked to put the most important responsibilities on it. Then stick it to the wall. These were grouped by themes and identical entries were placed together. Our use of the technique was much closer to Dot Voting as found here @http://www.kstoolkit.org/DotVoting

To learn more about Dotmocracy check out this site. @http://www.dotmocracy.org/

Then The work of Marzano et al was introduced. Specifically School Leadership That Works. This book is not available on Google Books but there are reviews, see them here. This work is a meta study where hundreds of studies were reviewed in light of the relationship to student achievement.

We started the day working on one of the most significant roles of a principal, that of "Change Agent". To do this we used the Think-Pair-Share learning strategy. This is explained in the Workshop Facilitation document. Rather than sharing verbally we did it with a poster because of the group size. Points we were looking for: - Human nature to not want to change. - Challenge the status quo. -Disturbs the individual in a manner that approximates the desired outcome. -Handles uncertainty and conflict well. Willing to make changes with uncertain results.
 * Day Three**

Michael Fullan, one of the world's most prolific writer on Educational Change warns of the implementation dip, where results drop after a major change until the skills and beliefs of the teachers have made the adjustment. For more information please see www.**michaelfullan**.ca/Articles_02/03_02.pdf


 * Day Four**

As an extension of the review we talked about why all the time on Learning Styles. We then asked the participants match "Information Retention" with "Learning Activity". They were surprised when we presented what the research has found about active learning. Our information was a little different than what this site is reporting, but close. @http://www.teachinontario.ca/employment/En/3b_strategies.html

A slide show on Active Learning @http://www.slideshare.net/ScottSmith/active-learning-1327412

Then we moved on to Affirmation as a responsibility of the Princpal. This was introduced as a Pros/Cons discussion sheet. Each participant read the section and then discussed it with an elbow partner. They then developed a pros/cons poster on a regular size sheet of paper.

Contingent Rewards was covered next. The participants read the section and then with a partner developed a poster of what they would reward teachers for and how they would do that. To share our learning we used a Gallery Walk.

The fourth concept of the day was Communications. The reading only mentioned two stakeholder groups so we first brainstormed who the stakeholders were in Dominica. Then we read the section and in the group discussed the communications plan that could be used to reach each stakeholder group. We then did presentations to the full group explaining the plan.


 * Day Five**

Day Six