Cyndy Mika: An Inspired Day at Harvard

Today was an inspirational day at Harvard. In the morning we had a wonderful time spent with Jeffrey Howard from the Efficacy Institute. I think the things that has come back to me as I have reflected the time with Jeffrey Howard is the idea that it is the teachers job to move students to proficiency and the principal's job to move teachers towards proficiency. Teacher proficiency (or adult proficiency) is the demonstrated capacity to move students in a school to academic proficiency and a strong character. Administrator Proficiency is the demonstrated capacity to advance the proficiency of other adults in a school. In order for an administrator to accomplish this we must utilize leadership skills and clarity about our mission to create professional learning environments for the adults in our buildings while empowering them to mobilize the students towards proficiency of the academic targets.

Kitty Boles in the afternoon gave us practice with powerful tools in order to help us develop our teachers as leaders and thus moving them towards proficiency: Rounds, Lesson Study, and Teacher Action Research. I am most interested in Rounds and plan to implement this next year upon return to my campus. Rounds is a strategy used in the medical profession as they are teaching their interns about practicing medicine. At the school level I can see this being used for very specific goals such as morning bell work, transition time, guided math, small group reading, center time, etc... as new (or experienced) teachers lacking a specific skill can make rounds with specific things to look for. This group making rounds would need to be afforded the opportunity to reflect upon what they saw with a facilitator of the rounds.

In the past few days i have seen two great technologies that i would love to have on my campus.... A tablet notebook computer for interactive powerpoints and the Turning Technologies Response Cards that allow the participants to vote or choose multiple choice answers which are then translated into bar graphs of the response immediately within the Power Point. I could see great applications of these two technologies at the campus level. It is fabulous that the Harvard professors are not only infusing us with new ideas but are adept at the most recent technological advances and are able to demonstrate these for us.

Cyndy A. Mika