10. Leadership and Collaboration
“The teacher seeks appropriate leadership roles and opportunities to take responsibility for student learning, to collaborate with learners, families, colleagues, other school professionals, and community members to ensure learner growth, and to advance the profession.”
Standard Components
Leadership
Being a public school teacher is an honor that comes with huge responsibility. To work effectively towards a more perfect union and eudaimonic life for all students, professionals must lead the way in promoting improvements and implementing new strategies.
Collaboration
Two minds are truly stronger than one, and to best optimize public education educators must work together to problem solve and increase student success. Collaborating with the professionals around me is internal to my teaching practice and a cornerstone to my development as a professional..
meeting the standard
Group projects were never something I looked forward to growing up. I struggled being open to other people’s ideas and would bulldoze my way to being in charge. Even in college, I would roll my eyes at the idea of sharing the workload with anyone else, trusting that I would end up doing more than my fair share. Today though, while I still enjoy leading a group and tend to find myself being pulled into leadership roles, I have grown to find great joy in working with others and accomplishing greater things in groups than I ever could alone.
Joining a school community and finding my place within it has been a rewarding and insightful journey. Problem solving and creatively addressing student needs with teachers across disciplines, grade levels and specialties offers some of the most valuable and enriching lessons for me as a professional. Hearing from and iterating alongside various perspectives makes our decisions more informed and precise.
I was fortunate enough to participate in school improvement planning, PLC directed time and have numerous support staff in and out of my classroom throughout the day while student teaching. In my leave replacement role I coordinate regularly with the principal, counselor, families, district staff and tribal education liaisons. The wider I cast my net of familiarity within the school community the more I recognize how the power of one is not just amplified through collective efforts, but it is limitless.
