Mentor Interview Report

From your perspective, what accomplishments might be attributed to this leadership initiative? I believe the greatest accomplishment that you did was to initialize a sense of a Professional Learning Community (PLC) within your department; starting from scratch, your committee have acquired some knowledge about establishing professional conversations about teaching and learning. In addition, you also have established another additionally important pattern, which is to gather data to guide decisions; your committees implementation of the survey and resulting action plan is an excellent approach to foster a PLC environment. Finally, I consider involving the rest of the teachers within your department another achievement; through surveying the teachers first, and then communicating the results and action plan to them, you have involved all staff in your department; which is again a very valid starting point for expanding your PLC to all staff. If I could rewind and do this again, what might have improved the results? There is always room for improvement for leadership; I believe that your initiative should have included teachers from other departments, instead of just focusing on the Primary Department only; including staff from the High School or Early Education Department would have added value to your committees discussions and work and would have expanded the achievement and the PLC culture across the board. What changes have you seen in me as a teacher and teacher leader as a result of this course work and leadership initiative? I will adapt the question to your role as a Leader of a Department; I have seen concrete change in you in Leadership, but also in Educational approaches; you have developed your interpersonal skills, as well as your education knowledge. In addition, your approach to leadership is now more a coaching one, which is reflecting very positively on your team members, whom you are now guiding towards professional development. What would you recommend as next steps in developing as a teacher leader? In addition to keeping your initiative going, I would recommend that you keep working on your professional development continuously, setting at least 2 areas / topics to develop for every academic year (e.g. curriculum development, educational technology, ). In addition, I would also recommend that you organize and deliver PD sessions to your team to share with them the information you are gaining from the various courses and workshops you are attending. What are the next steps for this initiative? I am hopeful that your committee will expand next year, and that the Committee you have created will keep working next year, and will undertake a new initiative; this will keep the PLC going, with you guiding returning staff and new staff towards maintaining a professional dialogue amongst them.