Project 2 - UCLA TIIP Grant Team Leader

Overview

The goal of the UCLA Teacher-Initiated Inquiry Projects (TIIP) is to promote teacher innovation and creativity as a vehicle for school reform. As a team leader for this two-year professional development grant, my leadership goals are:

• To engage in multiple professional development activities (observing classroom instruction at model schools and participating in summer institutes) in order to develop, implement and evaluate a project-based curriculum for middle-school science.
• To facilitate a vision, 2-year project calendar and budget that fits the evolving needs of our team.
• To facilitate team meetings concerning professional development reflection, curriculum development, data collection and data analysis.

The grant team included two secondary science teachers from Southeast Middle School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Below is a visual summary of the professional development and action-research conducted through our TIIP grant.

Below is a visual collage of the artifacts and resources obtained from classroom observations and professional developments at various schools and conferences.

Reflection

This two-year journey has been an eye-opening experience for me, as a teacher and as a leader. At the start of the professional development period, I was a teacher unaware that I was stuck in my own bubble, with my instructional skill-set defined by the particular set of instructional methods I had been exposed to in my teacher credentialing program and our district's professional developments. I knew that there were more effective methods, and I felt as if I had hit a ceiling in my professional growth.

As part of the professional development grant, I observed numerous classrooms around the nation, from the structured, college-focused classrooms at Uncommon Schools in New York to the less structured, project-based classrooms in San Diego. Each school and student had its own distinct culture and best practices. Engaging in dialogue with teachers and students from these schools allowed me to reflect on my learning and transform the way that I had been teaching; it was as if I was learning about teaching for the first time again. The process reinvigorated my teaching practice and helped me to realize that there is no one perfect instructional model for teaching, that good teaching is about genuinely understanding your students and to the best of your ability, providing a physically, socially and mentally safe space for them to develop as individuals who will affect positive change in our world.

As the grant team leader, I embarked on my first experience as a leader. I began to develop my identity as a democratic leader through being the vision-keeper, practicing shared decision-making, building capacity amongst my team-members and being open to constructive criticism. One notable learning experience was maintaining the vision of our project. As our team developed a deeper understanding of project-based learning, our original action-research question became inconsistent with our new learning. As the team leader, I was faced with the challenge of maintaining the integrity of the original vision, while adjusting it to changing circumstances. As a person that has a natural preference for order and sticking to the original plan, I grew in practicing flexibility and being comfortable with change and uncertainty.

CPSEL's

• 1.3: Allocate Resources to Support the Vision (With collaboration and input from my grant team, we leveraged sufficient resources through the TIIP grant to implement and attain a vision for our teachers to be trained in PBL and for our students to have sufficient materials to benefit from the PBL curriculum.)
• 2.3: Guide Professional Growth as a Staff (As a team leader, I provided opportunities for my grant team members to develop leadership skills through distributive leadership and shared accountability. Team members took turns facilitating meetings, organizing activities and managing the budget.)
• 3.3 Manage the School as a Learning-Support System (I monitor and evaluate the professional development program and ensure that our activities are aligned with our grant proposal and budget.)
• 5.3: Model Reflective Practice and Continuous Growth (As the team leader, I regularly refocus our grant team on the vision of our action-research. When new learning affects our original revision, I guide the team in reframing our vision. Through this continual cycle of reflection, our team has adapted our vision accordingly, despite many unexpected challenges that have occurred.)
• 6.3: Incorporate Input From the Public (Every year, our team attends the TIIP Annual Conference during which we share what we have learned from our work through the grant with the other TIIP teams. It is a reflective process that allows for us to engage in discourse and receive input from other educators and school leaders.)