Taking a Leadership Role

This week I co-hosted the second of three planned PD trainings for the teaching faculty around arts and science integration within the place of our school garden.
In the morning, Jaimie and I worked with the CIV (curriculum and instruction vision) leadership in each grade level to explore the roles of a leader and to consider how the CIV leaders can most effectively share the practices and goals of our school with the rest of their grade level. This year has been challenging- new principal, WASC accreditation- and it doesn't feel as though the CIV and curriculum coordinators have had as many opportunities to meet and network as we are accustomed to.  In fact, I was surprised to learn at Wednesday's session that 75% of the Wednesday teacher meeting time is allocated to data teams.  Such is the nature of the beast in the DOE that even at a successful arts integration school we are chasing student performance metrix based on computer-issued standardized tests. Because we are all aware of this reality and because we also know that our principal is not completely sold on the idea of all of this time, money and effort going into arts integration training, mentoring and practice our discussions also focussed on authentic assessment in arts integrated classrooms. We detailed a Say, Do, Produce continuum of student assessment in order to focus on how to gather evidence of what students say, what we see them doing in the classroom and what writing and other products they produce.  The list is just a start but it got me thinking about ways I can support the classroom teachers by gathering more formative assessment during STEAM lab sessions.

Specifically, I can take steps to create teacher checklists for each class in the grade level that is currently int he STEAM rotation and keep a running tally sheet of student participation in our facilitated academic conversations.  This will help the teacher with a record of participation and also give them a resource to draw from when having a discussion with a student about the quality of their work- ask more questions in class and be more plugged in to our engineering challenge projects.

I feel as though i already use a lot of photographic and video evidence of student work but I can commit to using photo and video as evidence of student thought and collaborative process- I can take video of students when they are in the brainstorm and refine ideas phase- catching the moments where ideas are being formed, tested, refined or modified and new ideas take form.

I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this dialogue and the trust my curriculum coordinator supervisors have placed in me to help bring integrated science into the classroom in a more organic and student-interest driven way.  I have to be realistic and understanding of where classroom teachers are coming from and what their struggles are while still holding everyone up to a vision of what our school will be like when the garden is our firm sense of place and everything we do with the students in the classroom has connection to the issues and concerns that really touch our lives.