Learning Forward
Equity and excellence in teaching and learning.
Champions Of Learning
District leaders build skills to boost educator practice
By Learning Forward
Categories: Leadership, School leadership, System leadershipOctober 2014
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A Decade of Growth
In the last decade, Fort Wayne Community Schools has worked to:
- Develop strong leaders. With financial support from The Wallace Foundation over nine years, the district put best practices in leadership in place, creating a data-driven decision-making process, new teacher induction, and a quality improvement team at every school.
- Establish the district’s vision, mission, core values, and goals.
- Develop a balanced scorecard data management system that allows the district and individual schools to analyze trends through an array of indicators, including SAT scores, attendance, or student performance on state standardized tests. The balanced scorecard is a strategic planning and management system used extensively in business and industry, government, and nonprofit organizations worldwide to align business activities to an organization’s vision and strategy.
- Hire at least one instructional coach for every school, creating a systemwide network of support through coaching.
- Partner principals with administrator coaches.
Definition of Leadership
Leaders, through disciplined thoughts and actions, create and sustain the conditions that ensure achievement of our moral purpose by:
- Shaping a shared vision and commitment to action for academic and social success for all students;
- Developing systems that support students and adults;
- Modeling and cultivating courageous leadership; and
- Distributing responsibility for people, data, and processes that nurtures a culture of continuous improvement and empowerment.
Definition of Professional Learning
In Fort Wayne Community Schools, professional learning is a comprehensive, sustained, and strategic approach to increase educator effectiveness and results for all students. Professional learning fosters collective responsibility for improved student performance and:
- Is aligned with a rigorous academic curriculum and district improvement goals;
- Occurs in professional learning communities at all levels throughout the district;
- Is ongoing and facilitated by skilled staff using a variety of researched-based learning designs;
- Engages established learning communities in a cycle of continuous improvement; and
- Is monitored and evaluated as to its effectiveness to inform ongoing improvement and results.
Source: Fort Wayne Community Schools.
KASAB Chart For Principals as Leaders of Professional Learning
| A KASAB (knowledge, attitude, skills, aspirations, and behaviors) chart is a process of declaring essential roles and responsibilities in implementing an innovation in a learning system. | |||
| KASAB | Professional learning | Personalization | Precision |
| Knowledge:Conceptual understanding of information, theories, principles, and research. | Understand the Standards for Professional Learning, principles, and definition of professional learning. | Understand the concepts of personalization as they relate to adult learning. | Understand the laser-focus strategies to meet unique learning needs of each stakeholder. |
| Attitude:Beliefs about the value of particular information or strategies. | Value professional learning as a key lever for improving leadership and teaching practice at scale. | Value the importance of differentiating adult learning based on individual learning styles and identified needs. | Hold the belief that laser-focused actions will significantly improve stakeholder performance. |
| Skills:Strategies and processes to apply knowledge. | Facilitate a cycle of continuous improvement to develop collective responsibility to achieve Fort Wayne Community Schools’ moral purpose. | Evaluate, differentiate, monitor, and reassess individualized learning plans for adults. | Continuously and consistently assess effective strategies for improvement. |
| Aspirations:Desires, or internal motivation, to engage in a particular practice. | Aspire to increase everyone’s effectiveness through professional learning systems. | Provide differentiated, targeted professional learning that inspires adult learners to actively participate in their own professional growth. | Instill ownership for increased performance of all stakeholders. |
| Behaviors:Consistent application of knowledge and skills. | Create and strengthen professional learning systems; build relationships (1.1.3 & 1.2.3).Establish collaborative environments; learning community; collective responsibility (1.1.3 & 1.2.3).
Support the development of teacher leaders (1.1.4). |
Distribute leadership (1.1.4 & 1.1.5).Be able to take all sources of data and interpret those data to inform action plans to help school reach their goals (2.3.3).
Develop emotional intelligence (ability to be self-aware and support emotional needs of others) (2.1.1). Develop a student-centered culture (1.2.1, 1.2.3, 2.2.1, & 2.3.1). |
Hire the best teachers and principals and support them (1.1.1, 1.1.2, & 1.1.3).Recognize and support rigorous instruction (2.3.1 & 2.3.2).
Facilitate teams of teachers to build effective units of study around Common Core and design effective assessments. |
| Numbers in parentheses align with the Indiana State RISE rubric for evaluating administrators. Source: Fort Wayne Community Schools. |
Theory of Change
References
Hirsh, S. & Killion, J. (2007). The learning educator. Oxford, OH: NSDC.
Hirsh, S., Psencik, K., & Brown, F. (2014). Becoming a learning system. Oxford, OH: Learning Forward.
Learning Forward is the only professional association devoted exclusively to those who work in educator professional development. We help our members plan, implement, and measure high-quality professional learning so they can achieve success with their systems, schools, and students.
Categories: Leadership, School leadership, System leadership
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