Teacher Leadership Pt.1: M1_FA 1-Reflection

As per course,  

"Reflect back on your learning as an educator. What impact and change have you created? Who were the stake holders involved? What makes this a worthwhile memory?

Review and comment on two other postings by your colleagues."

As an educator, I began officially teaching in 2014, since then-the changes I have made are likely to be on a micro rather than macro level. I can't say I have made a change that has lasted indefinitely or even one that has carried my name closely to it for longer than a semester. 

I have been teaching in China for close to 10 years, (less a year or so), since beginning I have always taught in the English department of any school (of the two) I have been employed by. I have participated/even been head of departments, but as a department head at the school I was a DH with, it was the kind of department head position that seeks to buffer concerns between CT's and Administration rather than seek innovative new teaching techniques and styles. We as DH's or "HOD's" (as they later became adjusted to), needed to make time to develop professionally and bring innovation to our department-outside of the regular hours. I stepped down from my leadership role twice, once because two departments (my own and another's) were being included into one larger department, which was basically, "non-academic electives", and the second time was because of the birth of my son. Later I became an unofficial confident of the new department heads of a couple departments because they were new to the position and although administration wanted me back in the role, I did not feel enticed by their offers. Being friends of the DH's though, I was able to provide some help.

In both positions as a DH myself, I felt the biggest difference I made was the introduction to a structured assessment format, to avoid teachers "giving marks to easily" or not giving enough opportunities to improve scores, I was able to apply methods and regulations that allowed teachers to be both flexible and firm in regards to class materials and alignment.

As a confident I was able to inform decisions on new assessment practices that deviated from the original format of standardised testing and allow room for more creative/critical thinking focused tasks that were still able to accommodate the needs of English Language Learners.

I can't lie and say I had tons of revolutionary ideas that were going to forever change the lay out of a classroom, but overtime small changes to classroom changes I made were base for other classes and reinforcement for classroom wide resource/day-to-day structures that were being implemented within our school.

One of the most successful moments I had as a DH though goes back to the initial change over from more standarized BC Curriculum to what it is today, a more "open" to interpretation curriculum. Our Principal at the time was having a heck of a time trying to get teachers to buy-in into the early implementation of the curriculum. This idea was that the administration wanted to get ahead of the ministry inspection by about a year which meant departments across the school were in need of scrambling (not only), understanding of this jigsaw puzzle style curriculum but also newly styled lesson plans, course outlines-the whole nine yards. In some cases there were teachers who were decade or so before who had been just recycling (blissfully) and were now-unimpressed (to say the least), I took it upon myself to study most of the curriculum and its base policies and what not, work closely with department heads and my department specifically to ensure that it would be met with the least amount of resistance as possible. At the end of the year, we sat in our closing monthly meeting, and everyone looked around as we all nodded "yes", we feel confident and comfortable to say we can get inspected as a school that has began implementation of the New BC Curriculum. Needless to say the inspection was a bit of joke since no one really knew what the differences were of which they were looking for, but more so for the fact that it was still not drawing away from the "constructive criticisms" about the school's facilities. Sorry, it still cracks me up a bit. The administration's plan was certainly not altruistic and clearly focused on hiding discussions that were very blatant (as well as repeated through the past couple inspections) in regards to the school's facilities/management.