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icon Online Lecture - Hiring; Teacher Supervision; Evaluating Your Action Research Tasks

Hiring For Ethical Leadership

Hiring is one of the most important responsibilities of a school administrator. Ensuring that your teachers have the cultural competence to meet the needs of all students is critical to their success. The students that need the most intensive instruction need the most competent instructors. As a building or program administrator it is your duty to ensure that your staff builds relationships with teachers and has the knowledge and skill to provide quality instruction. Cultural competency requires that organizations such as schools and their personnel have the capacity to: (1) value diversity, (2) conduct self-assessments of progress toward cultural competency, (3) manage the dynamics of difference, (4) acquire and institutionalize cultural competency, and (5) adapt to the diversity and cultural contexts of the individuals and the communities they serve.

Cultural and linguistic competence is a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals that enable professionals to come together and work effectively in cross-cultural situations. 'Culture' refers to integrated patterns of human behavior that include the language, thoughts, communications, actions, customs, beliefs, values, and institutions of racial, ethnic, religious, or social groups. 'Competence' implies having the capacity to function effectively as an individual and an organization within the context of the cultural beliefs, behaviors, and needs presented by consumers and their communities. (Adapted from Cross, 1989). What does it look like for an organization practicing cultural competency?

A building principal must advocate for and provide guidance in allocating resources through effective management to ensure inclusive practices for cultural competency.

Seminar speaker Dr. Sean Dotson discusses the hiring process for future school administrators. He also provides tips on getting hired as a building administrator.

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Additional Lecture Materials

Evaluating Your Action Research Tasks(WSS Common Performance Tasks 1,2 and 4).

Action research helps educators be more effective at what they care most about—their teaching and the development of their students. Educators always want their instructional decisions to be based on the best possible data. Action researchers can accomplish this by making sure that the data used to justify their actions are valid(meaning the information represents what the researchers say it does) and reliable (meaning the researchers are confident about the accuracy of their data). Lastly, before data are used to make teaching decisions, teachers must be confident that the lessons drawn from the data align with any unique characteristics of their classroom or school.Although data analysis often brings to mind the use of complex statistical calculations, this is rarely the case for the action researcher. A number of relatively user-friendly procedures can help identify the trends and patterns in action research data. School administrators and teachers need to methodically sort, sift, rank, and examine their data to answer two generic questions:

What is the story told by these data?
Why did the story play itself out this way?

By answering these two questions, you can acquire a better understanding of the phenomenon under investigation and as a result can end up producing grounded theory regarding what might be done to improve the situation. "What is Action Research," Richard Sagor, ASCD, 2000.

The best approach to determining if the interventions in the action plans that you and your team implemented for tasks 1, 2 and 4 is some type of pre and post assessment. For example, on Task 1 which focuses on the two pillars of effective schools - curriculum, instruction, assessment and school culture, you might want to use student achievement data, discipline data, attendance data, etc., prior to starting your action plan and then take the same measurements at the end of the year. For Task 2, you might want your team of teachers working on changing their practice to have someone observe them prior to implementation and take data on the use of the interventions outlined in the action plan and then a post observation collecting data on how well they are implementing the new practice. For Task 4, you might want to survey parents on areas that you think will increase family/community engagement and then survey them at the end of implementation to determine if they see an improvement.