Apace of Change

by Damian Bariexca, Ed.D.

Archive for the ‘Goals’ Category

Arts Advisory Council: Origins

In my last post, I spoke briefly about the Arts Advisory Council, a new initiative in my district aimed at K-12 program development in the arts.  I’ve alluded to it in several posts over the last year, but haven’t sat down to put metaphorical pen to paper until now.  This first post of two discusses where the idea came from and how I pitched it to my staff.

Oh, and happy ninth birthday to my blog!

Origins

The basis for the AAC came out of my dissertation research on distributed leadership.  My review of the literature found that some element of shared decision making was a hallmark of schools with positive cultures and climates and successful distributed leadership initiatives.  To vastly oversimplify for the sake of this blog post, including teachers and other non-administrative staff members in such initiatives lead to high degrees of trust and open lines of communication between teachers and administrators and high degrees of investment in implementation of school initiatives.  Assuming (!) these initiatives are tied to advancing the organizational mission or vision, the logic then goes that you’re more likely to have more people on board with moving together toward the goals of the organization.  Again, a VAST oversimplification, but if you want more details, click the link above and read my dissertation and check out the citations.

In addition to the lit review, I heard first-hand about similar shared decision-making structures put into place when I interviewed the administrators and staff members of two middle schools in the pseudonymous Wellbrook School District in Delaware.  While each school does it slightly differently, both schools use a committee structure comprised of not only teachers and administrators, but also secretaries, custodians, food services staff, and anyone else who wishes to contribute to the discussions at the table.  Any member is welcome to bring a topic for discussion to the group, and all ideas are given fair consideration and ‘kicked around’ from various viewpoints.

Of course, this research is all relevant to building level decision making; as a K-12 department supervisor who oversees the arts program across 7 different buildings, I have different issues and topics for consideration that could benefit from the same approaches outlined above.  Putting research aside for a moment, though: if I have 21 talented, dedicated teachers, all experts in their respective fields and grade levels, why would I not seek to harness their professional opinions and perspectives as I seek to grow the district arts program?  To think I could do it all myself – even if I wanted to – seems to me the height of hubris, arrogance, and ignorance.

I decided I wanted to adapt this idea to the departmental level and involve any K-12 fine/performing arts teachers who wished to participate.  Our first meeting was in October 2015.

Getting Off the Ground

I emailed my K-12 music, art, and drama teachers in September 2015 with a brief explanation of what I was planning, and when/where we would meet to discuss.  Of course, this wasn’t the first most of them had heard of the idea of the AAC.  I had also brought it up in personal conversations with many staff members around the district – as early as the end of the previous school year (2014-2015) – partially to feel them out as to their interest level and partially to sow the seeds so the email wouldn’t be the first they heard of it.

I made sure to hold the meeting during a pre-scheduled meeting time.  Staff who attended the AAC meeting would not be staying beyond the end of their contract day or going to any additional meetings; they were just meeting with me in lieu of their respective building faculty meetings.  Armed with enough coffee & donuts to feed a small army, I made my case for the AAC to about half of the district’s art, music, and drama teachers (plus a French teacher who, while not technically a teacher of the arts, directs the middle school musical.  She asked if she could join the meeting and I was only too happy to oblige).

In my explanation, I laid out four broad outcomes I hoped to see come from the experience:

  • Give teachers a voice in the direction and development of the district arts program, both curricular and extracurricular
  • Give teachers a forum to voice concerns and problem-solve with content area colleagues (many art & music teachers in our district are ‘singletons’ in their buildings and don’t have others in their subject specialty with whom to talk during the day)
  • Develop a forum for proposing new ideas and collaboratively fleshing them out, with the benefit of multiple grade level and subject area perspectives
  • Develop actionable plans with built-in accountability for bringing solutions and proposals to fruition

As I said in the meeting, I was happy to come up with ideas and initiatives on my own, but I knew that the collective wisdom, experience, and creativity in the room far outweighed anything I could hope to do on my own.  To their credit, my teachers didn’t need to be asked twice – they ran with it, and the brainstorming began that afternoon.

In my next post, I’ll speak to what the first year of implementation looked like and what changes we might make as we begin the second year of the Arts Advisory Council.

Self-Care

If blogging for the last 8+ years has taught me anything, it’s that writer’s block is usually temporary, and that sometimes all I need to knock the cobwebs off is to push out a quickie post like this one, almost as a statement of purpose or resolve or something – even as a pseudo-cognitive-behavioral approach to getting back into the writing groove. I don’t know why it works, just that it usually does. So here’s hoping this is sufficient to get me going again.

Heh. Well.

In the 2+ months since I wrote those prophetic words, I’ve been doing pretty much everything BUT blogging:

  • Grad school: I did a Rodney Dangerfield and went back to school to take two additional graduate courses in curriculum development this year.  Exhausting but beneficial… glad I did it but glad it’s over.
  • Dissertation reviews: I’ve started a nice little side gig reviewing doctoral dissertations for APA format for my doc program alma mater.  Profitable, and it’s taken a serious chunk out of my student loan balance… but since I do it in the evenings and weekends, also very tiring and time-consuming.
  • Work: Now that I’m past the first year of “what the hell am I doing” in my position, I’ve gotten down to the nitty-gritty work of program evaluation and development.  I’m excited about the work my staff and I have been doing this year and into next, which includes expanding course offerings at the high school in the Music, Family & Consumer Science, and Business departments.

It’s really the grad school and dissertation review work that has taken the wind out of my blogging sails, so now that the grad work is over and there is going to be a lull in dissertation work until probably mid to late summer, I finally have some time to breathe.   Never one to look a gift pause in the mouth, I finally have a chance to focus on the near future; namely, my plans for the summer.

At the risk of beating the “lifelong learner” trope to death, I’m excited to be able to set aside some time for my own learning this summer.  I’m not sure if/how they will make me better at my job, or a better husband/dad/person, but I don’t see a damn thing wrong with learning for learning’s sake.

  • Guitar: I got my first bass guitar 25 years ago for 8th grade graduation, and I picked up guitar about two years later.  While I was an avid performer in my younger days and coordinated (and performed in) rock shows with my students as a teacher, my Tele has taken a backseat in recent years to caring for infants/toddlers and two rounds of grad school in 12 years.  Life circumstances prevent me from committing to guitar lessons (my first preference), but I am committing to getting my gear in good shape and woodshedding with the help of YouTube tutorials and Android apps.  I’m trying to spend at least 30 minutes a day with guitar in hand for the remainder of the school year, hopefully more once summer hits.
  • Programming: This goal is not particularly well-defined yet, but with the anticipated addition of programming courses at our high school over the next two years, I want to get a better understanding of coding principles and some experience in Java and/or Python. My Comp Sci-major floormate Lee taught me some basic HTML my freshman year of college in 1995 so I have the most basic of understandings on which to build, but that’s about it. I haven’t explored this in any depth yet, but I hear good things about Codecademy.

If you have any suggestions to help me with either goal, I’m all ears; please leave me your thoughts in the comments.

What A Difference A Year Makes

Today was New Year’s Day for 10-month administrators in my district.  After a summer that was equal parts restful and profitable (thanks to a good summer job), I started back today relaxed, focused, and looking forward to the new school year.

It was a welcome contrast to how I started last school year.  While I was excited to start my first administrative position, I was coming off The Summer That Really Wasn’t, thanks to the time I had to put into finishing my dissertation draft in preparation for a late fall defense.  Spending all summer writing meant I didn’t work last summer.  Fair enough, as we tend to budget well enough during the school year to compensate for the dip our bank account takes in the summertime, but then we got slammed unexpectedly with some urgent household repairs (including a busted central air unit and sump pump) that swallowed up a lot of money between August and October.

Between the financial uncertainty and the uncertainty of being in a new position (indeed, not only new to me, but a position that had heretofore not existed in the district, so I was really without a blueprint), I felt more than a little adrift last August – not a good place to be for anyone, let alone a supposed educational leader!

Fast forward to August 2015.  I’ve got a year’s experience under my belt, and my life situation this summer allowed me to work enough to make some money while still enjoying downtime.  Both my bank account and my sense of purpose in the job are more stable than they were last summer, and I feel much better equipped to attend to both the immediate demands and long-range plans in front of me.

Administrators in our district set professional learning goals for themselves that focus on self-identified areas for growth and learning.  For one of these goals, I’m very excited to put into practice in my department some of what I learned during my dissertation research.  I’ll be continuing to read and refer to the literature base on distributed leadership and collaborative decision-making as I try to implement it within the framework of my district’s arts program (I alluded to it here, but don’t want to say much more publicly until it’s up and running, after which I hope to reflect periodically about it here on the blog).

I’m also taking steps this year to learn more about the ins and outs of building-level leadership.  As a K-12 supervisor, I’m all over the district, which doesn’t give me much opportunity to set down roots and develop relationships with staff members outside my department.  I’m grateful that one of my principal colleagues has agreed to take me under her wing and mentor me, so to speak, in the art of building-based leadership this year.

It’s amazing how much more confident, less stressed, and more in control of my life I feel compared to a year ago.  While I think I did a decent job for my first year, I felt like I was holding on by my fingertips for most of it (much like my first year of teaching and much like my first year as a school psychologist).  I’m looking forward to building upon what I’ve learned and taking advantage of this improved frame of mind to improve my practice, and by extension better serve my staff and students.

Latest Greatest Hits

Happy Labor Day, and Happy New (School) Year’s Eve for many of you!

I’m actually writing this post in early August in anticipation of being pretty overwhelmed and without much time for blogging in early September, between starting my new job and heading down the final stretch of my dissertation journey.  Since I haven’t posted a rerun updated my “Damian’s Favorites” post category in awhile, I thought I’d link some of the items I’ve recently added:

Resume, Cover Letter… Blog?: My thoughts on how an online presence is at least useful, if not essential, in getting yourself a job in education these days, as well as my own story and some outlining of how and why I do what I do.

300 Miles: The more I learn, read, and hear about the importance of goal-setting, the better I realize it’s not just buzzy edu-jargon but (if done well) an essential tool in making progress.  This is one such example.

Don’t Break the Chain: More on meeting goals, but focusing on the journey there and how one comedian set himself up for success.  Simple and silly as it may sound, it has helped me enormously in my efforts to complete my doctoral dissertation.

What Will They Remember? #Ferguson: Thoughts inspired by the death of Michael Brown and your students’ responses.  They will remember how you made them feel.

Whether you start tomorrow or you’ve been back for weeks already, my best wishes to you and your students for a fantastic 2014-2015!

Don’t Break the Chain

Dissertation work has been going swimmingly, thanks for asking.  If we’re connected on Facebook or Twitter you are probably sick of me posting about the minutiae of my progress each day, and you’ve also seen me hashtag my Tweets #dontbreakthechain.

The idea of “don’t break the chain” comes from an article I’ve seen pop up several times over the last few years but to which I never gave much thought until now.  This 2007 article from Lifehacker outlines Jerry Seinfeld’s clever method of motivating himself to continue writing new material:

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.

Did Seinfeld actually say this?  Who knows.  The Internet is rife with stories attributing profound ideas or sayings to celebrities that may or may not be true.  The principle behind it, however, is one that I’ve actually used before, although not deliberately, in setting and meeting goals:

  • Whenever I do my 365 Picture-A-Day projects, seeing the daily photos and dates lining up one after the other motivates me to not “break the chain”.
  • The “Archives” list in this blog’s sidebar motivates me to blog at least once per month in order to not “break the chain” of months (if you actually care to look, you’ll see I’ve only missed one month in seven years).
  • I have to lift weights three times per week in order to not “break the chain” of steady progression.

I’m now applying that principle to my dissertation work.  I returned home from vacation on 11 July 2014, so 12 July was my first day on the chain.   Since then, I have made a concerted effort to work on some aspect of my dissertation every day.  Sometimes it’s for 30-45 minutes, sometimes it’s 4 hours.  The point is, as long as I put some work in, I mark the day off.

You can use any kind of calendar, physical or digital, for this task.  I’m using a website called (of course) Don’t Break the Chain; they have a Chrome plugin that allows me to see and update my calendar right from the browser:

dontbreakthechainI’ve only been at it for about two weeks now so it remains to be seen if this will help me maintain productivity in the long run, but I can say that chipping away at this monumental task little by little every day has helped me to stave off the feelings of self-doubt and paralysis I’ve written about previously.  With deadlines fast approaching (I need to have Chapter Four done and submitted by 1 Sept if I have any hope of defending in November), I’ll use any trick and take any advantage I can get.