Leadership+for+Accountability+Course+Reflection

"Developing a vision is a critical component of school improvement and school leadership". (Jones, 2007, p1) As a teacher who has been teaching for under four years, there was still a lot of aspects to education that I had yet to learn. Certain aspects of school leadership were still unclear to me especially since those responsibilities were not included in my portfolio. So coming into the //Leadership for Accountability// class, I believed that this course would expose me to a lot of information that I was unclear about. One of the very first things that I learned in this class was how crucial it was to develop a vision. Without a proper vision in place there can be no proper leadership and there will be nothing in which to measure school improvement against. One of the components that I learned about during the first week of this class was how to better analyze the data from the //Adequate Yearly Progress// data chart and how to disseminate the information for various uses. With the data gleaned from the //Adequate Yearly Progress// chart, I was able to see if the progress we were making fell in line with what the overall vision of the school was and if we feel short what we needed to do to achieve those goals. In week two, we learned about Data Mining. We used the //Academic Excellence Indicator System// chart to compare the //Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills// exam scores of the campus to the state's standard. For me I was able to see how a school achieved the status of recognized, exemplary, etc.. Prior to this I would only see these values presented in workshops and discussed but I didn't know how to do it for myself or even how to access the information. I was happy to not only learn how to do these things but also see how much growth my campus was able to make throughout the years. Transparency and clarity took on a whole different meaning as I saw how important it was as a future leader for me to "communicate to the school community the relationship between educators' actions and the school's performance". (Reeves, 2008, p,90) Looking back on some of the professional development sessions that I sat through, I realized that this wasn't something that many of the presenters did. Many time they took it for granted that the individuals to whom they were speaking to understood what was going on. These two weeks really made an important impact on me because not only did I learn more about these two data mining tools, but I also got to see how school administrators use the data taken from these charts to make decisions on how the school functions. While the activities done were just the tip of the iceberg, I left this class with a new appreciation for what administrators do and how they arrive at the decisions that they have to make. However while the data from these charts are important as a leader I must always keep in mind that "The goal of education is not to produce higher scores, but to educate children to become responsible people", (Ravitch, 2010, p.16)

Jones, L. (2007). The Importance of Visions for Schools and School Improvement. www.cnx.org. Retrieved from http://cnx.org/conent /m15634/1.1/

Ravitch, D. (2010). In need of a renaissance: Real reform will renew, not abandon, our neighborhood schools. American Educator. //34//(2), pp.10-22

Reeves, D. (2008). Waiting for NCLB. Educational Leadership. //65//(6), pp.89-90 www.ascd.org. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar08/vol65/num06/Waiting-for-NCLB.aspx