Description
Improving Teacher Efficacy and Efficiency to Drive Student Achievement
Connect - Creating Community
At the core of SLN’s Program Model foundation is building a strong Network community of principals engaged in action research. The learning environment of the Network serves as a powerful experiential model for members to replicate and build leadership teams and learning communities of teachers at their schools who are responsive to principal leadership and effective school change agents.
Principals in the Network also collaboratively explore best practices establishing healthy school cultures, openly discuss their critical questions and individual dilemmas of practice, supporting each other to try new leadership practices, and study the effects of their work reflectively and analytically. Principals, in turn, lead collaborative efforts with leadership teams focused on improving teacher practice.
Research has shown that reforms at high poverty schools fail when new programs and strategies are attempted without first establishing communities with healthy leadership teams that are responsive to change efforts[i]. SLN Networks focus their initial efforts on building and improving to improve school cultures thereby fostering school responsiveness to student needs.
SLN Networks strive to accomplish two goals relative to Creating Community:
- To develop strong communities among principals in the Network.
- To develop highly effective principal leadership, capable of establishing healthy leadership teams that foster learning communities of teachers whose efforts improve student achievement.
Lead - Creating Capacity
With established healthy school cultures, Networks shift to refine principal instructional leadership to build skills to identify leadership actions that will most significantly close student achievement gaps and develop teacher capacity that will result in increased student learning.
SLN principals develop the capacity to identify and lead others in the identification of key levers that if acted upon accelerate student learning and perfect deliberate conferencing and coaching with faculty. These skills increase the school leaders’ capacity to engage leadership teams in meaningful change efforts and simultaneously hold teachers accountable to improve student-learning experiences towards specific growth targets. The result of which is targeted improvements in classrooms across the school.
SLN Networks strive to accomplish two distinct goals while Creating Capacity:
- To develop the skills and practices effective principals use to analyze patterns of learning campus-wide and initiate strategic leadership actions to improve student learning.
- To develop effective principal leaders who monitor, coach, and actively develop teacher practice, that directly increases student achievement.
Succeed - Creating Change
To create change at the school level, each SLN Principal develops their own Theory of Action: a belief statement of actions and outcomes that will focus their school community’s efforts for the year. The Network supports principals as they strategically engage key members of their faculty in the development of a school-wide Theory of Action that is ultimately owned by the school as a whole.
SLN Principals learn to use action research as a model for change in their schools. Leaders define and analyze a student achievement problem on their school campus, create strategic plans to respond, take leadership action, reflect on outcomes, modify leadership approach, and measure achievement gains with the ongoing support of the SLN Network.
Network Principals enhance systems to build teacher leadership and further develop their established and effective teacher learning communities, leading to increased teacher efficacy for all teachers. SLN Principals become skilled adaptive leaders, who lead powerfully targeted improvements to teacher practice; thereby increasing student achievement.
SLN Networks strive to accomplish two goals in Creating Change:
- To continue to experience the support, safe environment, collective group responsibility, and learning necessary to sustain them through the challenges of adaptive leadership.
- To develop competencies in adaptive leadership that sustains system-wide change to effectively improve academic achievement for all students.
[i] Duke, D. L. (2008). Diagnosing school decline. Phi Delta Kappan., 89(9), 667.
Waters, T., & Grubb, S. (2004). Leading schools: Distinguishing the essential from the important [Electronic Version]. Mid-Continental Research for Education and Learning, from http://www.mcrel.org/PDF/LeadershipOrganizationDevelopment/4005IR_LeadingSchools.pdf
