Shared Leadership: Building Collective Responsibility to Live the School Vision and Mission Webinar
August 18, 2015 | 5:00 p.m. ET
Presented by Cassandra Erkens and Natalie Romero
Moriarty Elementary School staff began building a professional learning community during the 2013–14 school year. In the brief 18 months that they engaged in the work, they saw staggering gains. End-of-year assessments in 2015 revealed a 22% increase in reading proficiency for grades K–3 and a 21.6% increase in math proficiency for grades 3–5.
Located in Moriarty, New Mexico, the elementary school serves a rural community. The student population is 100% free and reduced lunch, 20% special education, and 8% English learners. Moriarty Elementary School has experienced high staff turnover in recent years, putting many first-year teachers in the classroom.
To begin the PLC process, Principal Natalie Romero put together a guiding coalition and then created data team meetings. She conducted the early team meetings and knew deeply the reading and math data for each of the 465 learners in the school. During the 2014–15 school year, Natalie partnered with Solution Tree associate Cassandra Erkens to shift the leadership of the process over to grade-level teams.
At this webinar, Cassandra and Natalie will share how to replicate the transfer of leadership and the process of holding each other accountable in your schools.
- Establish a culture of learning.
- Design a foundation that will create the moral imperative to support shared responsibility.
- Model the data team meeting process to allow for gradual release of meeting facilitation.
- Integrate collaborative learning into the collaborative common assessment process.
- Provide leadership and facilitation skill development to teacher leaders.
- Develop and rehearse a shared language of mutual responsibility.
