TEACHER

LEADER PROJECT 1

Teacher Leader Project

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Presented to the Department of Educational Leadership

and Postsecondary Education

University of Northern Iowa

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In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirement for the

Master of Arts in Education

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by

Austin Schmidt

American School of Kuwait

Hawally, Kuwait

February 20, 2018

--

Dr. Denise Schares

TEACHER LEADER PROJECT 2

The teacher I have decided to work with to create a leadership development plan

was a fellow new teacher to the American School of Kuwait. Her name is Jenna and she

is currently in her eighth year of teaching and has previously worked in multiple schools

in Canada, Egypt, and The United Kingdom. She currently teaches fourth grade, and has

taught grade four for a majority of her professional career.

Using the themes that describe the technical work of teaching from Mike

Rutherford’s The Artisan Teacher Jenna and I carefully analyzed the areas where we feel

she excels, and which areas she wishes to make improvements. I asked her to choose

three areas that she feels are her strengths in the classroom and three areas she would like

to make improvements to better serve her students. She identified that her three strengths

were the creation of clear learning goals, congruency, and the analysis of tasks. She felt

three areas she would like to make improvements were diagnosis, overt responses, and

the making of mid-course corrections.

The first area she found she was skilled at was the creation of clear learning goals.

As a whole school community, the administrative team has pushed for the using of “I

Can” statements. These are short statements used to preface lessons so students are

familiar with what the expectation is. She combines the essential questions from the

units, and turns them into student friendly “I Can” statements that students can refer back

to.

When Jenna and I conferenced about her strengths, she also identified how she is

able to create activities for her students that are matched to her goals and already

displayed “I Can” statements. Of the three success principles for congruency, Jenna felt
TEACHER LEADER PROJECT 3

she excels at stick-to-it-ive-ness (Rutherford, 2013). She is able to continually return to

areas of concern to ensure that her students are able to master the necessary skills.

The final strength from the technical work of teaching that Jenna found was in the

field of task analysis. She carefully looks at what her end goal is to determine which steps

to take to get there. There are three important parts necessary for the success of a task

according to Mr. Rutherford. The first step is to look with the end in mind, when

planning tasks for her class, Jenna makes sure to look at the ending goal and then makes

sure all of the previous steps end up there. The second step is to make sure that all of the

sub-goals are present. These must be mastered by students in a sequential order for them

to be successful in the final task. The last of these three steps couples with the previous

step and that is making sure that the order makes sense, and will result in the student’s

mastery of the learning goal.

Jenna also identified three areas that she wished to make improvements on over

the course of this year by utilizing a leadership development plan. The first area she

would like to see improvements made is in the area of diagnosis. The effective use of

diagnosis will help a teacher to ensure they know what their students already know, and

then make adjustments in their teaching practice.

In a way that is closely related to the first area of improvement Jenna sees, the

second area, which is overt responses is another area Jenna finds herself struggling and

would like to make improvements. Finding overt responses is a way for teachers to be

able to see what their students are learning and how close they are to achieving the

learning goals given to them.

TEACHER LEADER PROJECT 4

The final area of improvement that Jenna would like to make is in the area of mid-

course corrections. The ability to make mid-course corrections is when a teacher can

make quick adjustments to the lesson at hand. This is directly related to the previous two

areas of improvement Jenna found. When a teacher sees they must make changes to their

lessons based on what they are observing from their students, they are making mid-course

corrections. As teaching is rarely something that goes exactly according to plan, it is a

necessary skill for teachers to be able to make changes as new information about their

students come out, and teachers are assessing what their students need additional

assistance with.

With Jenna’s strengths and areas of improvement in mind, I have developed a

plan for her to make improvements in the technical work of teaching. As was noted

before, she felt her strengths were in the first three areas: clear learning goals,

congruency, and task analysis. Because of this, the plan will focus on ways to improve

the three areas she felt she was weakest in, the areas of diagnosis, overt responses, and

mid course corrections.

The three areas that Jenna wishes to improve in are all closely related to the ideas

of how teachers monitor what their students know, and how they use that information to

make alterations to the lessons they are teaching. There are four courses of action I wish

to offer for Jenna to improve in these three areas of instruction. The first of these is I

would like Jenna to utilize the use of exit slips in the classroom. The second way for

Jenna to improve as part of her development plan is to utilize a wide variety of formative

assessments to assist in their instruction. The third way is for Jenna to implement a

checklist system for students to use to self assess their knowledge. The final part of my
TEACHER LEADER PROJECT 5

development plan is for Jenna to use informational observations of her students to better

improve her instruction.

The first part of my development plan is for Jenna to utilize the use of exit slips in

her classroom to better gauge where her students are at as they attempt to master the

learning goals at hand. This will help Jenna to improve in the areas of diagnosis and in

the field of utilizing overt responses. This can also tie into congruency, which Jenna finds

to be a current area of strength. As Rebecca Leigh comments about her 2012 qualitative

study, exit slips are “slips of paper on which students reflect upon what they know and

what they are coming to know” (Leigh, 2018, p. 189.) “Exit slips offer students a

physical space to digest ideas, to question, to ponder, to ruminate over what has been

shared and discussed in class” (Leigh, 2018, p.190). When this practice is moved into a

classroom, it allows the teacher to keep up to date tabs on what the students are gathering

from the topic at hand. Using these slips, teachers are able to go back and evaluate their

lesson plans and reintroduce topics that many students have struggled with. The last part

or debriefing of the exit slips will also help Jenna as she attempts to make mid-course

corrections.

The use of formative assessments is the second part of my development plan for

Jenna. This part of my plan will focus on Jenna’s ability to obtain overt

responses. According to a 2017 study “on average, formative assessment had a positive

effect on student academic achievement” (Klute, Apthorp, Harlacher, & Reale 2017, p.

6). The study goes on to explain that formative assessments in math had larger effects

than formative assessments in other subjects (Klute et al., 2017). As formative

assessments were shown to have greater effect in the area of math, this is the subject I
TEACHER LEADER PROJECT 6

will recommend that she uses the majority of formative assessments in the field of math.

There are many different types of formative assessments that Jenna would be able to

utilize to improve her knowledge of her students. A piece of advice from Mike

Rutherford is that “overt instruction should be gathered during instruction, not following

instruction” (Rutherford, 2013, p. 41). I will encourage Jenna to use different formative

assessments both student directed, and other-directed assessments can be utilized to help

gather information about student achievement.

The third part of my development plan for Jenna to the implementation of the use

of checklists and other self-assessment tools for her students to make their learning

known. This will help Jenna to achieve her goal improving the areas of diagnosis, overt

responses and mid course corrections. This can also tie into an area of strength for Jenna,

clear learning goals. Checklists can be utilized in any area of classroom instruction for

the student to offer the teacher a clear showing of what they are gaining from the lessons.

Checklists, as an added bonus, help to include students in the education process where

they become evaluators of their own knowledge. As Mohammad Reza Javaherbakhsh

explains “Involving students in their assessment and evaluation process is an essential

part of the balanced assessment. When students become partners in the learning process,

they gain a better sense of themselves as readers, writers, and assessors” (Javaherbakhsh,

2010, p. 217). In the same way that formative assessments were seen as more beneficial

in the field of math, checklists and other self assessment tools are better equipped for the

areas of reading and writing, therefore I will recommend for Jenna to focus on

implementing the use of checklists in the already used school wide curriculum of readers

and writers workshop.

TEACHER LEADER PROJECT 7

The final part of my development plan for Jenna is for her to be intentional about

the informal observations she takes to monitor the progress her students are making. This

will help her primarily with the goal of helping to strengthen her ability to make mid-

course corrections. This can also tie into a strength she feels she possess which is the

ability to sequence the necessary steps for mastery of a learning goal. As teachers are

constantly making observations about their classroom, the next step is to be conscious

about what they are observing. By making short notes in a journal, or on sticky notes

Jenna would be able to make active connections between what she is seeing and what the

goal is. When she writes down an observation, she will make the necessary changes to

her plans as she is making a conscious effort to make those adjustments in her class.

By following these four parts of Jenna’s development plan she will be able to

show improvement in the areas of diagnosis, overt responses, and in mid-course

connections, while playing up her strengths in the creation of clear learning goals,

congruency, and task analysis. This can be later judged as part of the school wide

monitoring of teachers new to the school. During the second quarter, a member of

administration observed all first year teachers, and action plans were made for teachers to

improve. This development plan can act as an additional and more intentional and

personalized plan for Jenna to show that improvement that the administration is hoping to

see by the time that our second observation time comes around during the fourth quarter.
TEACHER LEADER PROJECT 8

References

Javaherbakhsh, M. R. (2010). The impact of self-assessment on Iranian EFL

learners’ writing skill. English Language Teaching,3(2). doi:10.5539/elt.v3n2p213

Klute, M., Apthorp, H., Harlacher, J., & Reale, M. (2017). Formative assessment

and elementary school student academic achievement: a review of the evidence. Regional

Educational Laboratory. Retrieved February 17, 2018, from

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED572929.pdf.

Leigh, R. (2012). The classroom is alive with the sound of thinking: the power of

the exit slip. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education,24(2),

189-196. Retrieved February 17, 2018, from

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ996265.pdf.

Rutherford, M. (2013). The artisan teacher: a field guide to skillful teaching.

Weddington, NC: Rutherford Learning Group.