Action Planning
I have always thought of action planning as a really good thing. Our Dufor reading has made me think more about what we are doing with our plans than on the making of the plans, which has always been a big focus.
Because change is a process, not an event, any innovation will take awhile to take root and make gains. Change needs to start with a common vision so that people can work toward a common goal. Just creating a vision doesn’t impact student achievement. While I believe that our actions need to be purposeful we need to spend more time living our plans than writing them.
As we said during my week at NACL, our plans need to be “living, breathing documents.” We will have spent close to 3 years learning how to develop an Action Plan for our district science program. Now is the time for the action part of the plan instead of just the planning part of the plan.
As we continue to work on our School Improvement Plan and SMART goals this week I will keep this in mind and try to share with my colleagues. We often make these SMART goals in November and don’t look at them again until the next year. Our Principal is working to change that so our actions live out our school vision (pg 229). I really like this change. She is trying to make changes in our departments instead of issuing a school-wide decree (pg 227).
I struggled with this quote and my questions this week until I read our discussion postings: “planning is essentially unrelated to organizational performance.” (pg 230). Don’t we need to have a focus so that our actions work toward a goal? What I am left with is that our plans should be dynamic. Our plans need to focus on student learning and need to be assessed frequently for effectiveness. Just like we would do in our classrooms.
We have started a NACL PLC (because teachers love acronyms) and will continue to work through the PD planning cycle. I am starting to see myself as a teacher leader and my role in our department and in the district. It has been so nice to have this class this quarter. Everything I have learned can be applied to work we are doing in our district! I am even in charge of coming up with possible PLC ideas for our group using the resources from this course.
