LQS 3 Embodying Visionary Leadership “A leader collaborates with the school community to create and implement a shared vision for student success, engagement, learning and well-being.” (Alberta Education, 2018, p.5). As a leader, I am action oriented, intuitive and compassionate; these were the three personal characters of trait I described myself during a leadership conference last year. It is my desire to solve problems, intuitive and my nature to lead with my heart that has strengths in leadership and gets me in trouble. I listen and acknowledge challenges with energy and enthusiasm. I have a strength in providing structures and continue to strive for improvement. However, when I come across problems or situations that are new, and I don’t have answers I feel like a failure or imposter. McDerment stated (2017),” leaders will often find themselves in situations they’ve never encountered before. Even if they have the necessary skills to arrive at a solution, they may find themselves stumped when they don’t have easy answers at the ready”(p.1). I am a roll up your sleeves person and I am quite comfortable to solve problems on my own. Sometimes to my own default, as I need to slow down, learn to articulate the problems and let others work through solutions. I know this is an area for growth for myself. It allows collaboratively having others work together, take on ownership when problems occur. Plus, it allows me to learn to lead others to solve problems. I would say if I had to give myself a mission statement, it would be to form a caring, inclusive family of learners and problem solvers; adults and students in order to become their contributing members of the community. This mission statement is my WHY! No matter what school, what staff, this mission is universal. This is my WHY, and in my tiny school and demographics it is important that we remember our WHY. Sometimes, the staff can become overwhelmed with the social/emotional needs of the students and get so busy keeping their heads above water that efficient practice precedes effective. Teachers are great at being efficient; however, I find this practice does not have heart. Being efficient means, it is making change that has a positive impact and doing the right things. Efficient takes times, is collaborative, requires listening to many voices but results in understanding the why. As stated by Sergiovanni (2005),“clear goals, aimed at a compelling target can have an enormous effect because they engage more than simply the brain. They engage the heart...” (Grenny et al., 2013, p. 18). This mission statement allows for success in students, and teachers. If staff are constantly learning, striving to be their best, the natural outcome is inspiration for students to be their best. If students leave a school I have been in as a leader and they continue to love learning, can solve problems and feel they were cared about, I did my job. As stated by Deal &Paterson in the learning this week, "values are not simply goals or outcomes; values capture a deep sense of school priorities” (p.66). Our priorities at my school are the values to create a safe and caring place of learning for our kiddos. Without my school keeping our values and the why at the forefront, our students would not reach success. We need to remember to meet Maslow before Blooms each day, and our students will reach success. The teachers are always strong at keeping those social emotional needs met, but at the same time, it is essential as a systems leader I work with teachers to focus on professional learning that supports best practices in teaching and learning. We cannot let their situations be excuses and as Cliatt stated, "so what, now what” (2015). I want my students to walk away with strong mathematical and literacy skills along with the ability to solve problems and be contributing members of the community. APPORI Results Area for Growth: Percentage of teachers and students satisfied with the opportunity to receive a broad program of studies including fine arts, career, technology and health and physical education. We dropped significantly this year in this area. It was our staff and students survey results that impacted our results. This current 2019/20 school year, Westminster school had to do some restructuring to accommodate an influx of new students at grade one and two. Therefore, when the administration looked at the Accountability Pillar Results in May 2020 it was no surprise that our scores were very low in the area of programming. The current structure was to provide smaller classes in grade one/two in the morning for math and literacy. One of the grades one/two classes was taught by our Music specialist teacher. To free up our music specialist teacher in the afternoon to provide music classes and preps for teachers, her grade one/two students would be filtered into two other grade one/two classes. Very quickly it was evident that the students could not manage the transition to new peers, teachers and larger classes in the afternoon. The students were dysregulated, a great deal of behaviours was occurring and parent complaints arose. A few early strategies were tried; extra education support in the classroom, using the district behaviour specialist and visible administration presence in the classroom. The administration felt something larger needed to happen to bring about positive change to the grade one/two classes. In early October, the administration collaborated amongst themselves and made a quick decision to eliminate the Music program for preps, have teachers provide their own music programming and put the Music teacher back in the classroom full time. However, this decision also created a scheduling problem of finding a way to provide preps for teachers. So, the ELL specialized programming was eliminated, and the ELL teacher provided preps for with PE. Our ELL teacher does not have a PE background but was more than willing to take on this role despite losing her specialty position as an ELL teacher. All this restructuring did result in less behaviours and a more regulated grade one/group of students. However, it became evident that our decision was not without consequences. The teachers and students were disgruntled with PE programming and instruction along with the lack of music curriculum occurring in the classroom. Teachers attitudes were not just directed at the lack of music programming but at the teacher delivering PE. The problem was multi-faceted. Looking at Fullan’s (2006) Change Theory model, administrators need to take some ownership on our decision and drill down to figure out how to come to a resolution as a staff on our model to provide music and PE instruction along with our professionalism to our staff. According to Fullan (2006), all the factors in the top circle are areas that need to be addressed before our staff can move forward in collaborative problem solving. As system leaders, we need to fully understand all the factors and truly understand what our data is telling the administration. Going through and doing a SWAT analysis will allow for administrators to be data informed not data driven. (Rhodes, 2020, slide 7). If staff perceive that the leaders understand the concerns, are invested in change, then buy in will most likely occur.