Tag: Department Head

Pushing Others

One thing I’ve wanted to work on for the past couple of years is my ability to lead people who don’t think like me.  It’s really easy to modify people who are on the same page with your, but pushing people to try new things and do things differently has always been a struggle for me.  This week I took a new tactic with my department, and that is requiring change in small baby steps.

My department falls short in its adoption of technology of any kind.  We have half of the department that does a very good job with technology and innovating in the class room, but we have another half that isn’t as innovative as our principal or our district is wanting out of us.  In the past I would have allowed our campus technology person to present some technology and ask for people to try it out.  This would lead to the tech-savvy people trying it out and reporting back to the group how it went, while the non-savvy people would get the pass on having to try something new.  I want for everyone to get a taste of trying something with the possibility of failing, so I tried a new tactic.

This week I gave them a goal to be on Twitter for fifteen minutes over the course of the next two weeks (since we have Thanksgiving break next week.  I based my number on an article I read extolling the virtues of Twitter as  professional development and figured I would give my department a little more time than the article says.  We each took a different educational hashtag to put into either Twubs or Tagboard and look for interesting articles.  When we get back to school after the break, we’ll share our findings from Twitter and I’ll talk about using it consistently to innovate as an educator.

Stop and Ask Why

I got the opportunity a couple of years ago to become the department head of the history department of my middle school.  I knew this was going to be a challenge from the day I took it over, but I always thought that it couldn’t be too challenging.  I guess I never stopped to think about how the people in my department could make me stop and ask why I’m doing things.

Very recently I’ve started to get challenged on some basic things that I took for granted.  For instance, this year we opted to not issue every student a history textbook.  We did this for a number of reasons, the main one being that we thought that we needed to use the textbook as a resource and not a crutch.  My principal and I both thought that history from a textbook is a boring way to be force fed history.  Some of my department disagreed, but went along with it.  For the most part this school year it hasn’t been an issue, but this week I feel like I’m starting to get more resistance.  I’ve gotten challenged in meetings and it has been referenced in our department meetings.  Usually, this wouldn’t have bothered me very much, but I was absolutely exhausted on Friday and it seemed to linger with me.

All of today I reflected on the situation and I had to ask myself why I’ve chosen some things that I have.  I think my assumption was that my department all thought the same as I did about these topics, but when they didn’t I had to go back to the drawing board.  What I settled on was that we’re doing the things we are in the history department because my principal and I think it is what’s best for the kids at my middle school.  Period.  All I want is for the kids that walk through this school to be taught by the best educators possible.  I think some people in my department get scared when they see test scores.  My focus is not the test scores, it’s making the teaching in my department to be the best it possibly can be.  I have to remind myself that often or I start to waffle on what needs to happen.

Flipping for Change

Our history department is doing something that I’ve really been interested in trying for a while.  We are all taking a way of making our lessons more engaging, trying them in our classrooms, and then reporting back to the rest of the department about how they went.  I made sure when we talked about this to mention that this does not need to be a perfect attempt, we just need to broaden our horizons of teaching a bit.

When we developed out list of engaging classroom activities, I had my eye on Socratic Seminars because my wife loved them in the classroom.  I decided to let the rest of the department choose first and I would take whatever was leftover.  I ended up getting to try flipping a lesson and using Skype in the classroom.  Both of these ways of teaching have interested me, but I’ve needed a push to get myself started, so maybe this is it.  I’m working with my awesome iTeam person to get the creative juices flowing.

Have any great experiences with these lesson models or others you find particularly engaging?  Please let me know!

Coaching Change

This week is one of the biggest in my career as a teacher.  It might be on par with my appointment to department head of the history department at my school and the day I was hired in my district (which was tougher since I was alternatively certified).  This week I officially signed paperwork that says I will teach from now on, but not coach.  It’s a bittersweet ending, but one that is the best for me and my newly formed family.

I have coached since the day I entered the classroom.  To be honest, coaching was really something I wanted to try as well as a way to get my foot in the door with a district.  When I was single, I thought I could coach for the rest of my career.  Sure there were long nights and early mornings, but what else did I have to do?  As I began to progress through engagement and into marriage time became more precious.  Suddenly there were more forces at work pulling me all over the place.  I wanted to do everything, but I was severely limited due to my coaching responsibilities.  My wife and I began talking about what a family would look like and our desires for how it would operate.  We didn’t agree on everything, but we did agree that coaching and family life don’t go together in our household.  We decided that when we began our family it was time to begin looking for the ability to teach but not coach.  I lucked out this year because some situations happened that opened up a full time history teaching position for me to take.  Part of my brain thought I would have to leave my district and search for a position that didn’t require me to coach, but luckily that didn’t happen.

I’m really happy to be able to commit to more family events this upcoming school year.  I’m excited to be able to take off a Monday, Tuesday, or Friday during the football season without being deathly ill.  I’m really excited to be a true department head for the history team.  I’m sad to not be around the awesome group of coaches at my school as much, but I’m excited to begin the rest of my teaching career.

Leadership and Beyond

This week was a typical last week of school.  Two days of finals, a half day to end it all with the kids, and a day of checking out of school.  I am not the biggest fan of the last week of school, for the most part.  I hate killing time with kids because we have to be there because the kids get bored with that so quickly.  I feel like I always have run out of energy and get short with my students more quickly during the last week.  By the time the kids leave on the last day my mind is clouded by my frustrations of the last week of school and not the wonderful memories of the past school year.  The kids are interesting though because even the ones that have hated school all year long reflect on the “good times” and don’t want to leave.  That’s one thing my school does really well, we create an atmosphere of family that the kids can recognize.  They are excited to leave for the next step of their educational journey, but they always look back with fond memories of their junior high days.  I’m so grateful to work at the school I do with the people I do.

Yesterday we met as a leadership team to discuss changes for the upcoming school year.  It is basically all the grade level leaders, department heads, administrators, and a few selected teachers meeting for a day to review policies and set new ones for the upcoming school year.  Usually it’s in the middle of the summer, but this year we decided to have it really close to the end of the school year.  This year we decided to change our schedule just a bit and talked a lot about welcoming new teachers onto our campus.  I think this a bigger problem in teaching than most veteran teachers actually realize.  I lucked out being closely linked with a couple of other coaches and had them looking out for me my first couple of years, but rookie teachers don’t always have people looking out for them.  We decided to take it upon ourselves to train up the new teachers to our campus as well as reminded each other of some of the difficulties of transitioning to a new campus so we can all be aware of where the rookies may need some more support.  Hopefully we’ll do a better job of welcoming these new people to our team.

I’m pretty sure we’ll be welcoming a new member to the history department this year, so I really want to make sure they feel supported and integrated well into our department.  Maybe it’s just my perception, but I feel like I have a very fragmented department overall.  This year I really want to try and get everyone on the same page and move forward as a department.  We have some challenging personalities in the history department so it won’t be easy, but I would really like to see movement toward a cohesive group.  We’ll see how this goes in the upcoming school year.