Personal Narrative: My Administrative Project Goals

My administrative project goal focused on collaboration and working on our curriculum with my English department 9-12. Personally, this has been an area that I wanted to focus on for years because I felt that each ELA teacher was not able to move forward when it came to developing a viable curriculum. As teachers, we were planning on an individual grade level, but we were not specifically aware of what our colleagues were doing. For example, questions like: How much research was being done with students?, Who was practicing the skill of close reading?, What literary elements were being covered?, and What types of writing assignments were being done? needed to be answered. Other than a sporadic professional development day, there was no time built into our schedules to discuss, analyze, and plan for curriculum goals. If there was one goal we as ELA teachers could agree upon it was: helping our students become better writers. Therefore, my focus during the year was aligning and scaffolding the high school ELA curriculum with Common Core Standards, while planning for ongoing collaboration within our department. First off, for two days over the …show more content…
Some of the meetings were scheduled by the principal, but they were not held on a consistent basis. We did have a few professional development days and superintendent days that we were able to work on curriculum as well. Also, when we assembled for our department meetings (once a month) we were able to discuss how the quarterly goals were being implemented. On various occasions, I also met with the department head (ELA 11th grade) to problem solve and discuss quarterly goals. Our ninth grade ELA teacher will be retiring this year and I have been part of the team to communicate our 9-12 goals to the new hire, a middle school ELA teacher.
What are lessons learned and what are next