Administrative Professional Learning Community
Sweet Home Administrative Wiki - maintained by Geoffrey Hicks
Wiki Description
Welcome to the Sweet Home Administrative Wiki. This wiki is designed as a place to post and share ideas about the concepts that guide the Sweet Home Central School Administrative Professional Learning Community. Search around to find information on PLC topics and add experiences to the wiki. The ideas presented on this home page represent the work that has served as inspiration for the Sweet Home professional learning community, and which have framed the initiatives devoted to continuous school improvement in the district. The authors listed on this page represents the most cogent voices in school reform. The challenge is to find the connections among and between their work, and to continue the process of actively constructing meaning with the constructs of leadership and continuous improvement. The wiki is set up so that users can browse in a nonlinear fashion, exploring hyperlinks to idea and concepts. We strongly encourage administrators or other educators who view the wiki to add their experiences and insights.
The 2008 summer administrative retreat was held on August 11-12, 2008 at the Sweet Home Norman Vergils Community Center. The basic objectives of the retreat was to build administrative understanding for leading the vision of the school district and to construct meaning around the core intiative for the 2008-09 school year, work on unit designs. The work that framed the reteat can be found on the separate wiki page, including summaries of the two texts administrators were asked to read, Our Iceberg is Melting and A Whole New Mind.
The 2007 summer PLC Retreat will be held on August 30-31, 2007 at the Sweet Home Norman Vergils Community Center. The administrative team will work with Peg Portscheller, a consultant from the Center for Performance Assessment. The team will work
The Balanced Leadership Framework builds upon the meta-analytic studies conducted by McREL (Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning) into the practices of effective school, teachers, and principals. The studies provide general guidance for what school leaders and teachers can do to increase student achievement. The Framework helps school leaders apply findings from the research on effective principals to their own leadership behaviors. It helps leaders connect vision (i.e., knowing what to do and why to do it) with action (i.e., knowing how to do it) in their schools. Pieces of the Framework have been incorporated into the evaluation instrument utilized in the Sweet Home Central School District. Click the link above to access a separate wiki page on the Balanced Leadership Framework.
The collaborative summer retreat will be held on August 22-23, 2006 at the Beaver Hollow Conference Center. There will be four school districts participating in the collaborative retreat, Sweet Home, Clarence, Williamsville and Kenmore-Tonawanda. We will be working with facilitiators from the Center for Performance Assessment. Click the link above to access a separate wiki page on the 2006 PLC retreat.
Antecedents of excellence are the strategies employed by a specific school that lead to academic achievement and the attainment of other system-wide goals. Antecedents include causes, instructional strategies, administrative structures, and conditions for learning. Click the link above to access a separate wiki page on antecedents of excellence. Day Thoughts: Monitoring Antecedents
Revised Administrator APPR Rubric
The revised administrator APPR rubric can be viewed in the file section of the wiki ( http://sweethomeadminwiki.pbwiki.com/f/AdminEvalTool06Rev1.pdf ). In the revised document, some of the original rubric dimensions were deleted and an entire new section, entitled correlates of effective leadership, was added. The correlates were gleaned from the reseach conducted by Robert Marzano, Timothy Waters, and Brian McNulty, which was published in the book, School Leadership that Works (ASCD, 2005). Please use the comment button for this page to provide feedback on the revised rubric.
In the book School Leadership That Works, Robert Marzano and his colleages relate the results of a meta-analysis research study that identified 21 responsibilities of a school leaders. The "responsibilities" that Marzano identifies can be considered antecedents of excellence, falling under the category of administrative structures and conditions. It's important to consider the 21 leadership responsibilities, especially those with the highest correlation to student achievement, and those that are most closely identified with "second order change". Click on the link above to view a separate web page that provides information on Marzano's work.
Michael Fullan's work has guided the evolution of a professional learning community in Sweet Home. In his book, Leading in a Culture of Change, Fullan outlines a framework for understanding the change process that includes five conceptual elements. The Sweet Home administrative team has utilized the framework to help construct meaning with the variables of leadership and the concept of change. Click on the link above to view a separate page with more specific information on Leading in a Culture of Change.
Rick Dufour is the former principal and Superintendent of Adeli Stephenson High School, one of the most celebrated public schools in the United States. Dufour transformed Stephenson High School by building in the principles of a professional learning community (PLC). He has written extensively on PLCs and his most recent book, On Common Ground, is a collaborative work that critially examines the big ideas of a PLC with many of the other experts listed on this wiki page. Click on the link above to view a separate page with more specific information on Professional Learning Communities.
Mike Schmoker - Results
Our administrative team has utilized the ideas of Mike Schmoker as a template for engaging small learning teams in the process of analysis and decision-making. The simplicity of Schmoker's model makes it an ideal process for small teams to engage in. Sweet Home will have Mike Schmoker facilitate the work of secondary level small teams during the Superintendent's Conference Day in October (2006). Click on the link above to connect to a separate wiki page on Results.
Thomas Friedman is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New York Times. His most recent book, The World is Flat, has been a seminal work for the Sweet Home administrative team in helping to shape our understanding of a changing world and correspondingly, the impetus for changing our schools. Friedman uses the methaphor of a flat world to describe how trends such as outsourcing, offshoring, fiberoptic telecommunication, supply chains, and other global trends have "flattened" the world. Click on the like above in order to connect to a separate wiki page on The World is Flat.
Jim Collins explores the variables that create enduring great organizations in his book "Good to Great". Collins describes that the book in neither about the old economy or the new economy, but rather it is about the timeless principles of good to great - how you take a good organization and turn it into one that produces sustained great results. The Sweet Home Administrative PLC team has critically examined the principles described by Collins in "Good to Great" and the monograph "Good to Great and the Social Sectors" in order to more deeply construct meaning with the dual constructs of leadership and systemic change. Click on the like above in order to connect to a separate wiki page on Good to Great.
Grant Wiggins has written extensively on assessment, understanding, and school reform. His most recent work is a study of the construct of understanding, and he has created a process, entitled "Understanding by Design" that is the preeminent model for curriculum design in the nation. Wiggins has applied the principles of "Understanding by Design", to the concept of leadership, resulting in "Leadership by Design". The ideas meld perfectly with the other authors listed on this page, and Wiggins conceptualizes a disciplined way of thinking about understanding as it relates to leadership and school reform. Click on the link above in order to connect to a seaparate wiki page on Leadership by Design.
Admin PLC Web Links
This page has been viewed 
times.
GO TO TOP
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.