Hello Lit Ladies!
Bean and Dagen Chapter 6 Principals as Literacy Leaders
“The work that principals do, although it has some direct effect on student achievement, has larger indirect influences through the ways that their leadership influences teachers.” (104) Although the role of the principal is more organizational than simply in a school, this role indirectly influences student achievement and directly influences school and community relationships and individual teacher instruction. All of these relationships help mold the role of the principal as an instructional leader.
Responsibilities and roles of the principal include setting the mission and goals of the school, developing a culture of trust and collaboration, and actively focusing on instruction. These roles and responsibilities indirectly influence teacher to teacher relationships and student achievement.
“James”, in his assistant principal role, paints a picture of this journey by modeling the process of principals striving to become more of an instructional literacy leader. He began by listening to teachers to gain understanding as to what was occuring at school with the students and staff. He then wanted to set direction for the staff, therefore developing a mission and goal that the staff would share together. In order to build support though faculty involvement he decided to utilize distributed leadership using PLCs and ILTs (instructional leadership teams). He then focused on managing the instructional program through planning effective professional development and including experts outside the building. Finally, James utilized formative and summative observations to show that teachers continued to strive for shared mission of the school and he used data to guide instruction and diagnostic data to key in on helping struggling students. “His effectiveness as a leader, like that of a principal, is multidimensional. We believe that the most important step he took was to become aware of what those dimensions are.” (120)
Think about your situation and discuss:
What does distributed leadership look like at your school?
How does your principal fit in with the characteristics of an instructional leader?
How could you, as a reading specialist, support him/her?
WSQ 16 Working with Parents and the Community
“Parents don’t care about their children’s education or lack the ability or knowledge to support their children’s learning.” (216). I know I personally have stated this time and time again. But as this chapter points out, “...[Parents] situations, perspectives, and abilities may affect their capacity to support their children in particular ways.” (217) This statement helps me focus on the fact that no matter a parent’s background or situation, they want to see their children succeed in school.
The expectation of parents to be involved in their child/children’s education is at an all time high due to majority of states adopting the CCSS in which involved parents are better able to comprehend what is being taught. However, there is a line between involved and uninvolved parents. Many uninvolved parents of our nation’s children have cultural, linguistic, and economic differences. These differences include children of poverty from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, children of immigrants who may or may not be undocumented, parents who did not graduate from high school and diverse home languages. Other challenges include teachers who may not understand or have misconceptions about the families they serve. Teachers must “explore their own beliefs and attitudes about non-white and non-middle-class people.” (216).
Administrators and teachers must recognize that “one-size-fits-all” does not fit all families. Differentiated parenting states that teachers have to get to know parents and collaborate with them to learn their individual and family needs. This will be easier to create a plan for parental appropriateness - a plan for parent involvement that realistically can be attended to, given the family’s daily routines. Parental self-efficacy is in which “parents who are capable of reading, may lack the requisite knowledge and experiences to effectively engage in shared reading.” Parents believe they know how to read, but feel self conscious because they feel they are not “reading” the proper way and may feel that they don’t know what teachers practice everyday - appropriate reading materials/levels, modeling how to read, talking with children as they read, etc. Parents fear they may, “get it wrong.”
Outreach strategies to communicate with parents are some ways we may already be familiar with such as: encouraging an open door policy for family to visit at any time, offering a range of times for families to attend school functions, including parents’ home language on material that goes home, and developing a school Family Resource Center. Funds of knowledge is the school taking effective outreach to the next level. This is done by positioning parents as rich and valuable resources. Ways to achieve this outreach would be by making home visits and talking with parents and children about family routines and events outside of school.
Finally, home-school collaboration includes connecting parents to services that may be before or after school. Such services may be that the school offers before and/or after school care, which could include tutoring. External agencies that schools could refer parents to for continued home-school support could be community stakeholders such as the local library or the YMCA.
In this chapter, I have highlighted in bold print, some terms to discuss/compare in your blog discussions: differentiated parenting, parental appropriateness, funds of knowledge, parental self-efficacy, parental involvement, outreach, external agencies. What do some of these look like at your school?
Please look at the reflection questions in WSQ page 221 and Bean page 257 for those that have each chapter and choose one that strikes a chord with you that we can discuss in our blog on Thursday. Any questions, 1-3, would make good questions to discuss as you share what your chapter says.
Also, be sure to make connections across the chapters. Happy Blogging!
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