CEdu 527--Week 4: Change and Leadership

During this week, I have thought about different situations in life where I was involved in change and leadership. The recent death of the pastor who confirmed and married me particularly brought this home. Pastor Opem encouraged me to become a leader in the church I grew up in. He understood how to do this as a process. First, he asked me to teach Sunday School and serve as a lay reader. He then gradually moved me into positions of leadership such as Sunday School superintendent and lay preacher. As a leader, Pastor Opem recognized how to develop new leaders, but only over an appropriate time period. In addition, he orchestrated the change of a building program. He followed many of Gabriel's adaptive leadership techniques, some of which I have used as Little League president (building a 4 diamond complex) and my wife has used as a pastor (church building projects). When I go to his visitation tomorrow evening, I will be thinking of his leadership and mentoring skills.

Several things from our work this past week were very helpful. First, the Analysis of Change Activity made me realize how important it is to plan ahead, anticipate potential problems, and reflect when involved in the change process. Second, Gabriel's chapter 5 offered so many practical ideas for improving our school climate, morale, and community. His section on how to work through the many problems with our current high stakes testing environment was helpful and made me look forward to helping students in the future with my business vocational license. I also found many tips on how to support my fellow teachers. Even though I am not a department chair, I can still serve as a teacher leader by supporting my peers through collaboration, hallway presence, recognition, social activities, help during difficult times, and communication.

CEdu 527--Week 3: Applying Our Leadership Skills this Week

This past week, I have been in Florida, serving as a coach for my daughter's 16U fastpitch team. I have been able to apply so much of what we have learned in this class in my role as coach for our girls and a leader for our parents. Organizing side trips, meals, line-ups, finances, and schedules has been very interesting and challenging. Using Gabriel's tips on building consensus and mediating conflict has been most helpful on this trip. 13 high school girls, 2 overwhelmed house moms, and parents ranging from hands-off to meddling have provided me with many opportunities to try out what we have learned thus far in this course. I have actually enjoyed the process and the results and find myself quickly growing as a leader.

I have also been able to help my wife as she assumes the leadership role as pastor in her new church in Janesville. The "Who Moved My Cheese" video offered insights into how parishioners might react to the changes going on in their church. In addition, I have offered some of Gabriel's suggestions ("build support by identifying your supporters" "let someone else propose the change" "sit on your hands") regarding some upcoming potentially difficult personnel changes.

As a developing leader and teacher, I found the Beloit list and the Tune In article most helpful in acquiring a better understanding of what people of different ages and generations know and how they have grown up. Helping my dad learn how to use his new laptop in the next few weeks will certainly test my skills on how to relate with and teach a traditionalist (born in 1937) technology tools that are completely foreign to him at this point.

I look forward to applying what we have learned in this course and applied this summer at Falls North Junior High this autumn.

CEdu 527--Week 2: Using What We Learned this Week

In the past, I have wondered how an elective teacher can be involved in using data to improve our district's test scores. After my discussion with our principal, reading the "Guide to Using Data in School Improvement Efforts" document, and reading and replying to our online discussion board, I think I have some ideas.
First, my offer to serve on our next data retreat was enthusiastically received by our principal. Since our 10th graders did not meet AYP in reading and math, I believe that I can be of service to our students by learning more about how to incorporate reading and math standards into our business education curriculum. In addition, I can use my marketing background to help our data retreat group delve further into the demographics involved with our student groups that were low in advanced or proficient test scores.
Second, I plan on serving as a mentor to the maximum of three students again this year. I will request that I be matched with students that need extra support with their core academic areas. Even though I am not an English or math teacher, I can certainly collaborate with teachers from those core content area in order to assist my mentees in areas that they are struggling with.
Finally, our principal gave me a copy of the English Language Arts state standards that will receive greater emphasis this year. Many of these standards can be reinforced through reading and follow-up analysis in our business education curriculum. I have used the Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition for pertinent articles in my Business Venture classes. This could easily be expanded into Financial Life Skills. In particular, Standard A.8.4 (Read to acquire information) stresses comparing, contrasting, and evaluating articles, charts, and tables for accuracy and usefulness. I could easily add lessons that deal with this in our investing unit in FLS and marketing concepts in BV.

CEdu 527--Week 1: My School Leadership Roles

This has been a fascinating week of class in that reading my classmates' replies was so enlightening. All of us appear to be teacher leaders in one role or another and have also experienced a lack of leadership at times with peers or administrators. Sharing and comparing with each other has been most helpful in learning more about leadership.

I felt myself becoming a teacher leader last fall, my third year at Falls North Junior High. Believe it or not, my sense of leadership arose from DodgeBall. I was beginning my second year on our 8th grade WKCE committee. We were looking to find a wrap-up/rewards activity that would motivate our students as well as allow them to blow off some steam after several days of tedious, yet necessary testing. As we were brainstorming, I brought up how well DodgeBall worked as a rewards activity when I was subbing in Marshall. I also mentioned that our new Falls business manager, Jeff Gross (he formerly held the same position in Marshall), and our Marshall superintendent, Dean Gorrell, had participated in a staff/student DodgeBall tournament. This was a big hit in Marshall so I volunteered to organize and lead this in the Falls.

Even though it was a great deal of work, as Gabriel warned in his book, the effort was well worth it. Students and staff loved the competition and team building and we plan on doing it again this fall. I received many compliments from administration, staff, and students and suddenly found myself in a new leadership role, that of DodgeBall commissioner. Our 8th graders were motivated to work hard and get through WKCE because they knew we had a fun and physical activity as a reward. They loved creating boys only, girls only, and coed teams. The team names they created were hilarious and some teams even made up team t-shirts and outfits, similar to the Ben Stiller movie. Our guidance department, with funding from our very supportive principal, made up champion t-shirts that students often proudly wore all of the way until the end of the school year. Our PTSA even jumped on the bandwagon by asking me to organize a DodgeBall tournament for their Friday Frenzy student activity afternoon in February.

My commissionership allowed me to also work more closely with our principal, associate principal, and superintendent. There were legitimate concerns regarding workman's comp if a teacher were to get injured. However, I assuaged those concerns by making sure that all of us "older" teachers had done proper stretching with a warm-up led by one of our highly-regarded phy. ed. teachers. No one got hurt, everything went very well, and I will tweak a few things for this fall such as the sound system, team creation, sign-up deadlines, etc. As a teacher leader, I tried to be very observant during the event so that next year can be even better.

In conclusion, I want to list other areas in which I am a teacher leader:

• E4E Committee: This is a district committee that supports our voc. ed program and connects our staff to the business community. As a former retailer with a voc. ed. certification, I have been able to effectively contribute to this group.
• Softball coach: No doubt that I love this leadership position and learn so much from my fellow coaches.
• Business Education teacher hiring committee: I bring my interviewing and hiring experience to this group and am gratified that our selections thus far have lived up to their tremendous promise.
• Informal technology coach: My fellow bus. ed. teacher, Tami Strong, and I happily serve as teacher leaders by assisting our staff with hardware and software issues, particularly with how they apply to classroom learning.

CEdu 533--Week 5: Building a Website is Addicting!!

After working on my final project Website over the last several days, I found myself hooked on the process and greatly enjoyed the results. Learning how to make tables, using ImageChef and ClockLink, changing hyperlink colors, and linking to investing websites has been an enlightening experience. I now have a much greater appreciation of the work that goes into creating Websites and view sites with a more critical eye.

My only previous experience with HTML is with Classzoom, our district's CMS. The help link in Classzoom allows for only the basics such as underline, bold, and italic. This final project helped me learn more creative HTML options such as alignment, color hex values, ordered and unordered lists, and table hyperlinks, padding, spacing, and borders.

Over the weekend, I will make greater use of graphics in my final project, while always keeping in mind that my audience is my 8th and 9th grade students. I look forward to using this project in my Financial Life Skills classes this fall and eagerly anticipate my students' reviews (positives and negatives) on being introduced to a stock market simulation through web-based learning.

CEdu 533--Week 4: Thoughts on Websites for School Use

As we enter the last two weeks of this course, I am thinking of ways to incorporate what we have learned into my business education classes at North Junior High. Here they are:

• The embedded Google Docs custard demo was fascinating in that I could poll my students on their thoughts about our courses, their research on stocks for our stock market simulation, or sharing their findings when comparison shopping in our budgeting and consumerism unit.



• The website I am creating for our final project will serve as an introduction to StocksQuest, the free online stock market simulation we switched to last semester. Not only could I instruct my students on how to create accounts and execute trades, but this website and linked pages could also be used to teach students about relevant stock and investing terms and strategies. I will be evaluating age-appropriate sites that pass the rules we created in our "What Makes a Good Website?" group project.
  

On a personal note, I checked out the Microsoft Office Templates for Teachers link on John's blog. Our district did not allow the necessary Media ActiveX Control for downloading the Education Credits Tracker or Substitute Teacher Instructions template. I will try to download these useful-looking templates at home. It will be nice to become more organized in these two areas. Thanks for the tip!

Ced533—Week 3: Reflections on Web Design after a 3 Week Hiatus!

After wrapping up the school year and thinking about what we have learned so far in CEd533, I have come up with the following observations:

• I certainly look at websites with a more critical eye now. In particular, I was checking out my daughter’s summer fastpitch team site. As a coach, I sent sponsor information to the web designer. When I checked a week later, the site had not been updated and, in fact, the home page still said it was 2007. I will bring this up to our program’s head coach and let him know that we need to achieve a much higher level of currency.

Here is the link: http://www.worldseriestc.com/home.html

• My brother runs a gas barbeque grill assembly shop and retail outlet in Butler. The two manufacturers that he represents have websites, one of which he would like our study group to critique. As a business education teacher, I will enjoy reviewing this site with my group. I may have more of a managerial approach whereas my group members may have more of a consumer perspective. Both are important to consider.

Here is the link: http://www.modernhomeproducts.com/

• I look forward to learning about CSS, Java, content management systems, and helper software such as Dreamweaver. Many of my business education peers teach Dreamweaver and I need to have a basic understanding of it, whether obtained in this course or in my own work this summer.
• I wonder how easily I will pick up HTML again after being away from it for several weeks. I finally started to grasp it in Week 3 and I am curious how my retention will be. In addition, I have done our HTML work at my school. However, now that the school year is over and I have turned my keys in, I hope that our home computer will work well for my web pages. I did have some difficulties with Filezilla and graphics at home back in Week 1, but that may have been my inexperience more than anything else.