Change in Perspective

Over the past three years, my leadership style vascillated between a "hands-off" approach and empowerment of my teachers. With the demands of a full teaching schedule and the added responsibilities of serving as the lead special education teacher, leading through example was extremely difficult. After my first semester in the program, I have learned the importance of leveraging the skills of your team and empowering team members to take risks/accept additional responsibilities. 

As I prepared for the first special education department meeting at my school, I spent a day looking at the literature regarding professional learning communities (PLC). While the term is cast about regularly in the educational community, the implementation of PLC's look vastly different. For example, in my school PLC's feel more like departmental meetings where the principal goes through an agenda and delivers information. Teachers discussed the key ideas but there was not a sense of community or development of a shared vision and purpose. The meetings largely involved input from the regular players without development of a team vision or collective needs. I did not want my special education departmental meetings to feel like this. Instead, I wanted to leverage the skills of my team, develop a collective vision for the department, empower my team to develop professionally, and create a collaborative atmosphere. To achieve this vision, I implemented a few strategies:

1. I sent a short survey via Survey Monkey to poll the team regarding strengths, weaknesses, needs, and wants. A short six question survey provided me with a wealth of information about what my team wants and it also allowed me to find the strengths/weaknesses of each team member. 
2. After noting the strengths and weaknesses of each team member, I created a "buddy" system and paired up teachers based on strengths and weaknesses. Not only did this create a system whereby all team players felt like an expert in some area, but it also allowed me to push some of the responsibility down to my team members so I could free up some of my time to attend to the more complex tasks. In the past, my team always came to me as their first line for questions and I was on overload with the number of questions I received.
3. I asked each teacher to sign up for a month and prepare a 10-15 minute presentation to share a resource related to data collection (a priority for my team this year), present a student work for discussion and offer a new strategy they are using in the classroom. This allowed me the opportunity to empower my team members and offer them the chance to present as "experts" in a particular area.