Standard One: Strategic Leadership
School executives will create conditions that result in strategically re-imaging the school’s vision, mission, and goals in the 21st century. Understanding that schools ideally prepare students for an unseen but not altogether unpredictable future, the leader creates a climate of inquiry that challenges the school community to continually re-purpose itself by building on its core values and beliefs about its preferred future and then developing a pathway to reach it.
Element 1A: School Vision, Mission and Strategic Goals: The school’s identity, in part, is derived from the vision, mission, values, beliefs and goals of the school, the processes used to establish these attributes, and the ways they are embodied in the life of the school community.
Locating My WHY
The NELA journey has every Fellow locate their reason, their "Why". Why is it that we choose to do everything that we do for our students. Finding this why includes storytelling, personal journey's, and many reflections. NELA also has every fellow create their own individual vision statement. |
|
|
Applying my WHY
After locating my "Why" the next challenge becomes blending my why with the school's "why". I was fortunate in that my WHY went right along with Middlesex Elementary's mission and vision statements. |
Element 1B: The school executive articulates a vision, and implementation strategies, for improvements and changes which result in improved achievement for all students.
Leadership Agenda Minutes
Our leadership team at Middlesex is a large component of our decision making process. Rarely a decision is rendered without consulting the leadership team. In the meetings, decisions are rendered based on their direct relationship to the mission and vision of our school. |
|
Element 1C: School Improvement Plan: The school improvement plan provides the structure for the vision, values, goals and changes necessary for improved achievement for all students.
School Improvement Plan
Middlesex Elementary uses a web program referred to as IndiStar. This web-based platform houses our school improvement plan. The four documents linked as downloads contains the details of our School Improvement Plan. Our plan is linked directly back to our vision and mission statement and is a living document that is constantly being reviewed. My learning is two-fold in this area. The first is how fluid a school improvement plan needs to be; the second is how it needs to be "living". |
|
Element 1D: Distributive Leadership: The school executive creates and utilizes processes to distribute leadership and decision-making throughout the school.
Building Level Leadership
At Middlesex, the leadership team contains many leadership opportunities to assist in the growth of it’s staff. We have created roles for teachers and are utilized throughout meetings. These roles include: notetaker, time keeper, and facilitator. Just like our School Improvement Plan these roles are continuously changing as evidenced by the artifact to the right. |
|