administrative leadership professional growth plan - mcrel leadership responsibilities

8/2/2019 Administrative Leadership Professional Growth Plan - McREL Leadership Responsibilities

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Administrative Leadership

Professional Growth Plan (An Excerpt)

As a School Leader: I have been a homeroom teacher all my life; I may have been

given positions such as team leader, chair of various committees, and just this year, elected

as chair of the school improvement team (SIT), but I never left the classroom. Who would

ever think I would go this far of going back to school and take the challenge to lead in the

near future in an American soil?

My metamorphosis as a school leader has taken a long journey to where I am now.

It all started in 1993 at the Ateneo Grade School. On my first year in this school of more

than four thousand students, I was appointed as one of the two male faculty members of the

uniform committee. For years, women had run this committee till the newly appointed

headmaster thought the male faculty should also be appropriately represented. Could you

imagine being put in a position where the woman chair would oppose and criticize all

suggestions that I offered for the committee to consider? I wondered then what I was doing

in that committee; barely did I know that it was the start of my career as a school leader.

Seven years after that painful experience in the said committee, I saw myself moving from

one committee to another until I realized I was already the head of bigger committees that

involved the whole school with more or less three hundred teachers!

Leading the school improvement team this year in my school is one tough act to

handle. Without any experience at all in this committee, I ventured into thinking that

preparing and actually creating the school improvement plan (SIP) was such a heavy load.

Indeed, I was wrong. The SIP was actually a piece of cake if I were to compare it to putting

up a major activity that does not only include the SIT but also the whole faculty and staff as


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well.

My first venture with the SIT resulted to a 360-degree turn on my priorities as a

school leader. At first, I was thinking that setting clear goals, knowing the curriculum and

being directly involved with its implementation are more important than having quality

contact and interactions with teachers and students. But how can I set clear goals and

implement the curriculum effectively if no one in my staff believes in me? First, I need to

know who I am and where I am at this time.

Second, I need to know what my priorities are, and third, I need to build

relationships between and among staff members (including myself) before anything else.

Covey (1999; 2004) explained that to be an effective leader, one needs to practice the

principle of personal management where he exercises the habit of putting first things

first. For my staff to believe that they are in good hands, I, myself, need to set my

priorities. To realize this, I have decided to use the MCREL Responsibilities Sort:

-3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3

2 9 17 19 4 5 21

11 3 16 15 6

20 1 12 7 18

10 8 13

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The MCREL Responsibilities Sort above put me in a perspective that there is more

1) Affirmation; 2) change agent; 3) contingent rewards; 4) communication; 5) culture; 6) discipline;

7) flexibility; 8)focus; 9) ideals/beliefs; 10) input; 11) intellectual stimulation; 12) involvement in

curriculum, instruction, and assessment; 13) knowledge of curriculum, instruction, and assessment;

14) monitoring/evaluation; 15) optimizer; 16) order; 17) outreach; 18) relationships; 19) resources;

20) situational awareness; and 21) visibility.


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to leadership than just going into the field and implement anything that I have learned in

school and as a leader of various committees. It also brings me to a realization of who I am

and where I am as a leader. I am able to understand that being visible and building

relationships in schools are more important than being an agent of change. With this

activity, I discover that all things that I want for my school will come into place as long as I

have focused more on building relationships first than anything else in the world.

administrative leadership professional growth plan - mcrel leadership responsibilities

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