Today I had a wonderful experience at work that I hope will be the beginning of a continued program at Ocean View College.
This week saw presentations throughout the college of staff Professional Development. This was a program that was initiated as a result of a leadership change and in response to the college’s site improvement plan. The process for these presentations was to investigate the plan, and respond to the goals. All teachers and school wide support staff were asked to set goals in line with the site improvement plan and then expected to collect evidence throughout the year to show how the goals were achieved. This was a long stretch for many staff to indicate how they made impact on the student literacy, Numeracy and Engagement levels, especially the ground keeper and administration staff, but everyone manages to make this connection. and present their success story to a small team who worked together throughout the year. This alone was a fantastic culmination of success and gave everyone – including the principal – to share what impact they have had and how this is reflected in the improvement data.
As a group leader I found this experience to be extremely valuable in that I not only was able to support my team to understand how they personally made impact on these improved results but also to get to know staff on a more personal level whom I would not normally interact with on a daily basis. Through this hard work and the and the continual conversations in the staff room between all staff, the goals have been the driving force behind statistical improvements across the board in B-12 Literacy, Numeracy and student Wellbeing and Engagement. A success to be celebrated.
Today was also about beginning the next step in this continued improvement through the allocation of some time to begin setting site improvement goals for 2013. The goals for the new year include Literacy with a greater focus on consistent and sequential programming to ensure a thorough coverage throughout the college. Numeracy also continues as a school priority as it is recognised as a foundation subject. Student wellbeing and engagement is still a very high focus but has been succeeded by a new priority which also encompasses the engagement levels of students not only in our school but across the world.
I am happy to say the new priority for 2013 is ICT! I had some information that this would be included but to actually see this priority announced made me satisfied that the influence I have had on leadership and staff across the school. I know this had been as a direct result of my impact as the ICT use and incorporation of 2.0 tools throughout the school was almost non-existent outside the computing classes which had a total enrolment in 2012 of approximately 60 students out of about 800 throughout the school. Evidence of the impact is already measurable through the number of elective enrolments for 2013 in year 9 escalating from 9 students in 2012 to about 40 in 2013.
I have begin many other new initiatives across the college including weekly ICT sessions with the pre-school children, supporting teachers to include and substitute some classroom activities with interactive technology and sharing knowledge and resources to teachers in the form of training in social networking in the middle school which has resulted in classes beginning blogging and a sample of teachers using twitter to network with educators across the world.
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by *aliza*
The biggest surprise of the day came following the long morning of data analysis and goal setting for 2013 and looking to the future. Staff were all invited to join the leadership on a dolphin cruise where everyone was able to engage in what was titled “Team Building”. This was the best opportunity I personally have had to network with some staff who are not usually a part of my working team. This would have to be the best celebration of college wide success I have been involved with in the last 2 years. There was talk prior to the cruise about involving students in celebrating their successes which I believe is one of the best ways to promote further improvement. Lets now implement this experience in the classroom to share the success of achievements with our students.
How do you genuinely share school wide and personal successes with your students?