The new school year is well underway, and schools across the country are hard at work fine-tuning their systems and structures to serve their students. On the east coast, the East Windsor High School team from East Windsor, Connecticut, is working to empower teams (Focused Leadership Framework 2). They created schoolwide norms to guide collaboration and learning for all community members. They also developed targeted norms specific to their PLCs to maximize the impact of their shared learning and planning time. Both sets of norms adorn the walls of their newly established PLC meeting room.
In the midwest, members of the district leadership team from Springfield Public Schools #186 are also empowering teams (Focused Leadership Framework 2). The district directors have committed to their own PLC and have set a Vision, SMARTE goal, and action steps to guide their work. Now that they’ve committed to this goal, they will collect data on their action steps and continuously monitor their progress toward achieving it.
On the west coast, the Instructional Leadership Team at Cahuilla Desert Academy – Coachella Valley Unified (Coachella, CA) is utilizing data (Focused Leadership Framework 4) to bring consensus around their schoolwide work to improve student outcomes. They apply this protocol to guide their data analysis and lead conversations around next steps.
