Distributed Leadership - Another Look
PRESIDENT’S
While effective principals are driven to strengthen distributed leadership within their schools, to make it a common practice of their school culture, and to open doors for teachers to use their strengths for the good of the group, are we modeling such strategies at the district level as well? What are the communication and collaboration strategies used at the district level to reach educators across the district? Throughout the summer of 2018, I reflected on the high expectations and endless dedication of our Greenbrier educators and began brainstorming how to bring a select group of staff members together on a regular basis to make sure our work for students was effective yet as efficient as possible. Somewhat mimicking the make-up of a school leadership team, we began sketching out a plan for teachers representing a wide variety of grade levels, content areas, and departments, to join building and district leaders on a regular basis, to simply “work on the work” of improving our systems. The
Scott Spainhour
AAEA Board President
Superintendent
Greenbrier School District
Greenbrier School District Task Force on Effectiveness and Efficiency was soon born and had its inaugural meeting in August 2018. I shared the goals of this task force with the newly formed team:
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To increase cohesiveness and collaboration district wide To improve efficiency in the use of our educators’ time and resources To streamline the most impactful processes and systems that have led to student success across the district
The first meeting of each fall semester gives our Task Force an opportunity to determine the focus areas for the next several months. These discussions are filtered through two criteria: 1. 2.
What pieces of our work make the biggest impact on our students? What pieces of our work (that have an impact on students) take the most time and energy of our educators?
In 2018-2019, the monthly collaboration of our District Task Force members led to many improvements to our student support systems. Assessment was a large focus area. The Task Force revised our administration of the Measures of Academic Progress as well as ACT Aspire Classroom Assessments. These changes protected more instructional time and gave teacher teams more choice in how many formative 2
Administrator March 2020
Continued on next page
