L4L5 Capstone Portfolio Year 3

Reaching Surety in My
Leadership

Barbara Lee Peterson

Leadership For Learning, Cohort 5
University of Washington
May 2015
Reaching Surety in My Leadership

Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

In the culmination of my time in the Leadership For Learning Doctoral

Program, I have come to recognize, respect and utilize leadership moves that
I can bring to the field of education. As my faculty adviser suggested would
occur, I see the strands of the work we have done as a cohort, and the
learning I have done as an educator, knit together into a strong, flexible fabric
of values and intellectual talents from which I will develop the next era of my
professional work. The doctoral title does open doors. I feel greater
competence in speaking in the realm of public education with others and now
find peers among the principals and superintendents in my rural arena.
As I finish the third and last year of the program, the opportunity and
obligation to review my progress helps me also value the foundation I brought
to the degree program. I have new skills, powerful new alliances and new
perspectives, but my core beliefs are as they were when I began; I now have
more confidence in centering my practice on those beliefs.
I believe in education but see it as a much broader enterprise than the
six hours a day a student will be in school.

A student is open to learning

every waking hour of the day; I believe in empowering that student to be

open to, and value, of all those opportunities to learn, to be an actor in his/her
learning to have agency in their lives, accomplished through education, a
portion of which happens in the school day. I firmly believe that learning is a
human need, and that students will naturally want to learn if the environment
for learning is right and the learning tasks are compelling. I believe that

Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

educators can design these environments and these tasks to help each
student learn. I believe in the wisdom of the Common Core State Standards
to define what makes a learned person; I accept the challenge to help each
student meet these standards to give them agency to achieve the goals they
seek as actors in a complex 21st Century world. As I watch my 96-year old
father continue to engage with the world, I know the time these students will
have to explore opportunities is long; we need to provide them the tools they
will need to move into a world we know little about. As I review back to my
undergraduate degree in political science (my foundation) through my
Masters in Public Policy to my now nearly completed Doctoral Program in
Education leadership, I have confidence in my preparation.

My Goal: Giving students agency.

My Objectives:
o

Not only doing things right, but doing the right things, for students of color,
students learning English, students who live in low income communities

(Standard 1).
Leading as a colleague; illuminating issues in K-12 through inquiry-focused

o
o

practice (Standard 2).

Leading curricular change from afterschool (Standard 3).
Leading change of policy and practice to ready underrepresented students to

succeed in postsecondary programs (Standard 4).

Building and contributing to a broad Community of Practice engaged in systemic
improvement to educational systems to ensure equity and excellence for each
student (Standard 4).

Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

Doing The Right Things, Doing Things Right

For Students Underrepresented in Access to Educational
Opportunity.
Because of my leadership, changes are underway (in differing stages) in
the sixteen districts with whom NLA works to change policies and amend
systems that have created disparities in the learning opportunities for nearly
5600 students in rural central Washington school districts. While we serve all
rural students passionately, we champion those students traditionally
marginalized: students learning English, students from migrant and
immigrant families and students living in poverty (1a).
NLA Group provides programs in 35 buildings and serves a student
body larger than the Bremerton School District, through auxiliary afterschool
math and literacy remediation and postsecondary preparatory programs.
Two-thirds of our students are students of color and our programs, funded by
federal grants, focus entirely on rural schools serving exclusively students in
low-income districts(1.a; 1.b). My job in these low performing schools is to
work with the lowest performing students and bring them to proficiency in
content areas or to ready them for postsecondary education (1b). My agency
mission is firmly focused on an agenda promoting Equity and Excellent
(Standard 1).
Thirteen of my 38 staff are Hispanic; in most districts, my hires are the
highest paid Hispanic staff with Bachelor of Arts certification -- in the district

Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

(1a). It is through these hires that I hope to encourage districts to consider

teacher candidates of color. This initiative is not without risk; having hired
staff of color over staff with experience, I am now faced with needing to
quickly improve my new staffs skills and aptitudes on the job so as not to
jeopardize the options of future staff of color to be hired in these districts.
Given the schools with whom we work, the entirety of NLAs mission is
securely located within L4L Standard 1, Equity and Excellence.

Illuminating Issues through Inquiry-Focused Practice;

Leading as a Colleague

- Standard 2.

I have engaged in in-depth cycles of inquiry on issues of common

concern (2a) to my eleven districts, and using the outcomes, have engaged
these districts in explicit discussions of racial, class and language inequities
(1a). Two separate cycles of inquiry (COI) were conducted in the Chelan
School District, one COI focused on equal access to rigorous coursework, and
the second on addressing students on the D&F List, a list of students failing
core content courses. Sharing the outcomes from Chelans analysis, I
engaged district principals in considering similar issues occurring in their
buildings. In my findings, students of color are much more often on D&F lists,
and must less often enrolled in rigorous courses.
In deep discussions with district administrators and superintendent, we
assessed data (3f) in their buildings (enrollment of students, by gender and

Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

ethnicity) to identify disparities. We then defined better ways to ensure these

instructional opportunities are offered equitably to their students. One start
to this change was by inviting rural district teaches to full-paid AP training this
summer in Bellevue and Spokane. The purpose of this was to (3e) expand the
pool of teachers and the number of available AP and rigorous classes
available for our students. But the secondary purpose of this training
offered to any interested general education teacher whether s/he was
currently teaching AP was to help these teachers, working with colleagues
and trainers, to find more strategies for teaching students who have not
previously enrolled in these programs in large numbers (2b, 2c, 4b, 3f) and
ensuring their success. This training will benefit those students in AP or
rigorous courses; it will also devolve to be improvements to teaching and
curricular design in any general education class these rural teachers teach.
As a result of collaboration with Chelan School District where I
conducted these cycles of inquiry, I sought and secured an opportunity for
Chelans administrators to present at a national conference this July, bringing
their superintendent, principal, counselor and school board member to
present on the cycle of inquiry concerning their approach to reducing the
number of students on their D&F lists. The presentation will address issues of
equity and will showcase the districts pioneering efforts. The national stage
will heighten this issue among our districts (1d, 1e, 4e). An aside: this
collaboration was facilitated by a fellow L4L2 colleague, Dr. Rob Manahan,

Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

Superintendent of Chelan School District who enabled me to complete this

work.
In support of standard 2, I have broadened by research techniques to
more fully incorporate qualitative measures. Following Dr. Ishimarus
recommendation, I learned to administer focus groups, using this strategy to
elicit student input to their reasons for enrolling or not enrolling in rigorous
coursework. As she predicted, some powerful insights came from that
engagement that I did not encounter in all the journal articles that I had read.
I am expanding my use of focus groups in several directions: it will be part of
my final analysis on a cycle of inquiry analysis of students on the D&F list in
Chelan, seeking to learn from the students point of view which of the several
interventions we initiated were most impactful to students.
To site directors who are searching for answers to address problems
resistant to our existing strategies, I have provided training and support for
them and their administrators to learn how to engage in this qualitative
approach to data gathering (2b). And, notably, I am writing into all of my
grant submissions much more robust applications of qualitative data
gathering; in this, I have invested also in an evaluator who is also Spanishspeaking to help us illuminate issues that are invisible to us now from our
Hispanic parents. Prior to working with Dr. Ishimaru in our Student Interest
Group on Equity and Data, I did not focus so intensely on this; however, there
is no research in the literature on my specific populations. To learn if the

Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

national literature is representative of my populations, I feel I have to do more

independent research.
My greater understanding of the Cycle of Inquiry process has helped me
to build better interventions for programs I oversee. I am much more attuned
to, and understand more deeply the value of COI to guide action. I ask better
questions, and can be a better collaborator with administrators in discussions
of proposed efforts. It is more obvious to me when an administrator or one of
my staff is promoting an initiative without a clear aligning of data, a careful
theory of action and associated through-line to probable success.
Administrators speak highly of our well-designed initiatives and I am able to
reach outcomes that I could not reach previously because my interventions
are research and data-based and more apt for my problem and context. This
knowledge base will bring value to my partnerships because I can use this
process to help shepherd busy administrators to design processes and
interventions that more effectively support struggling students. I too feel
much less often stuck with a problem to solve that I cannot describe fully or
address.
Leading as a Colleague
I have learned to share the leadership through co-presentations with
trusted colleagues. In September 2013, I read a journal article stating that
peer-reviewed journal articles with multiple authors are considered more
rigorous, are more trusted and cited more often that journal articles with a

Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

single author. I invited three other L4L colleagues, Kim West, Cheryl Lydon
and Greta Borneman, to co-author an article for the Peabody Journal I was
invited to write; their shared passion and knowledge of STEM efforts in the
state strengthened our joint document which was published in May 2015.
For the Washington Education Research Association (WERA) December
2014 Conference six of my L4L colleges (Concie Pedrego, Mike Shieser, Bruno
Cross, Ken Turner, Tanisha Felder, Donna Morris) and I collaborated to take a
teaching/learning stance in our presentation on Gap-Closing Instructions,
engaging the audience with three separate presentations in a 75 minute
format. Positive reviews from the audience indicate that our efforts reached
out intended goals.
I have invited educators from outside our schools to augment and
enrich the programming available to our students. To build interest in STEM
fields and encourage students to consider rural medicine or health care fields,
I collaborated with Central Washington University biology faculty and
students to encourage them to build learning units around the theme of a
Zombie Apocalypse, borrowing from Red Cross and US Defense Department
approaches as a foil for training for a more realistic disease outbreak,
knowing students interest in zombies. CWUs programs were implemented
just as Ebola cases were emerging, providing the hoped-for reality tie-in to
the lessons. We now have a strong curriculum we can revisit, and can now

Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

engage students with working health professionals in lab sciences, public

health, issues of disease spread, quarantine and associate patient civil rights.
I support six of my sites to engage in RECON, a NASA-funded initiative
that will involve communities from Oroville at the Canadian border to
Goldendale at the Oregon border to do eight yearly observations of the night
sky using high-powered camera-enhanced telescope to map the Kuiper Belt.
Students, teachers, and community members are volunteers who will conduct
these observations; we are working to build volunteer recruitment networks
and strategies, develop the array of activities that can sustain interest of
middle and high school students, and to expand students knowledge of
astronomy using the rural night sky as our playground and lab.

Leading Curricular Change from Afterschool Auxiliary Position

(Standard 3)
Literacy: Working over the last 10 years with principals in grant-funded
elementary partner schools, I have engaged in discussions to build
afterschool learning environments to help struggling students of poverty,
many students who are learning English, be successful in school (1a). In
early years, OSPI and principals directed my staff to align with school day
curricula, focused on homework completion as the approach most likely to
remedy students remediation issues. After several years with discouraging
outcomes, I reengaged conversations with principals (3c, 4d). In closed door

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

discussions, principals and I agreed that their buildings struggling teachers

were ill-prepared to provide our afterschool program the strategies to address
literacy and numeracy in students they sent to our program. The quality of
most homework was neither engaging nor instructional. There was little
wisdom in reprising school day interventions that had not worked for the
students, or for which they were now weary. Principals agreed (4 d,e,f). We
needed independent approaches to augment school day programs, designed
to (1c, 1e) best serve our struggling Engish-language learning students and
student from low-income families (3e).
I hired a new staff person with a Master in Library Science to build
exemplary literacy lesson plans that imaginatively align both with CCSS and
with the tenets of strong youth development programs, using project-based
learning, fund of knowledge (FOK) and place-based learning; all these are
appropriate to NLAs enrichment/remediation auxiliary programs. With these
modules, I am providing not only lesson plans, but the theory behind strong
teaching and instructional practices for our environment. As we saw from our
recent introduction of our literacy modules, I believe that these units will also
be adopted by some of our districts in time, to augment their in-school-day
enrichment programming. In this, I will be leading from afterschool.
We used what we knew about our students: they did not decode fast
enough to find any joy in reading; they had no experience getting satisfaction
from finishing a book; they were likely to be from a bilingual home where one

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

or more adults preferred to speak Spanish or Ukrainian rather than English

and they were not read to in the home. Using the CCSS and CEL 5D
instructional frameworks (3b) we crafted lessons that had to fit a demanding
set of specs: designed to meet mixed groups of students Grades 2-5, using
national award-winning and beautifully-illustrated books marked with lexile
levels and AR points, compelling reads that would build comprehension
through visual literacy with limited reliance on text. Some titles would be
English only, some English/Spanish or English/Ukrainian, some Spanish, some
Ukrainian to reach out to the home and affirm the native language. The
visual nature of the instruction would facilitate students rereading the books
to themselves or reading to and with their families. We would be
compensating for low reading ability by relying on visual skills, thereby
building 21st Century skills also needed in Common Core.
We focused on 21st Century Literacies of cultural competence, critical
thinking, collaboration and communication, meshing with the Common Core
Anchor standards (versus the too-voluminous comprehensive grade level
CCSS). We highlighted processes perfect in an afterschool environment:
classroom discourse, frequent interaction with peers, independent learning,
asking questions, diverse media formats for immersive language experiences
for students without requiring students to be demonstrating native-like

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

control of convention and vocabulary1. Other OSPI objectives2 for teaching

Common Core included family and community connections, multicultural
representations in media, opportunities for discussing age-appropriate
reactions to bias, sharing individual experiences, promoting balanced and
diverse viewpoints and scaffolding instruction for a variety of student learning
types and levels. Family literacy/family involvement is a linchpin of 21st CCLC
programs with which my staff struggled.
Our hard work has paid off. In our first two roll-outs, we made
presentations to administrative teams in two of our rural partner districts.
One district asked that we provide training for their teachers in August so
they would know our curriculum and align to it for struggling readers. The
other district committed to purchasing additional copies in the series of books
we have chosen, saying, When the students get excited about these books
from the 21st Century program, they will want to read more of them and we
want to be ready.(4.c) Parents are coming to pick up their children and are
lingering as their children excitedly show them the books they are learning
from.
Engineering programming: I am also proud of our efforts in
supporting our 21st Century students in our STEM programming. Linda
1 ELL Applications for Common Core http://www.corestandards.org/assets/application-forenglish-learners.pdf
2 Bias and Sensitivity Review of the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts
and Mathematics Implementation Recommendations Report
http://www.k12.wa.us/corestandards/pubdocs/implementationrecommendationreport.pdf

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

Hillman, a long-time employee has developed rich, compelling, multi-layered

learning that engages her students grades 1-5, students learning English from
low income families, most of them low-achieving academically. Linda is my
inspiration for understanding the concept of student agency. Her classroom
activities reflect the highest standards for student work and student discourse
(called out in instructional frameworks). I reported on her classroom
instructional methods in a well-received WERA session in Seattle in December
2014 (1e), on instructional gap-closing strategies; her work is referenced in a
rural STEM article I co-authored for the Peabody Journal, released in May
2015.
Linda has been asked by the administrators in the three
buildings/districts in which she has worked to provide her afterschool content
to small groups of gifted and talented (G&T) students, to help these districts
meet the new state standards for G&T. She and I facilitate discussions about
the evident abilities of our students identified as low performing by
showcasing their work compared to the gifted and talented students to
district administrators and School board members (1e). Linda continues to
provide G&T training to her students, regularly seeing them perform to high
standards. She and I shed a light on the ambiguities between the soft
prejudice of low expectations of our students and their capabilities (1e) and
attempt to facilitate explicit discussions for how these low expectations

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

undermine our students agency in their life and erect barriers to learning
opportunities at which they could excel.
Finally, at the end of Year 3, I can attest to meeting L4L standards of
Teaching & Learning (Standard 3), as I have articulated a theory of deeplyengaging, culturally-responsible and intellectually-challenging instruction
(3a) using instructional frameworks (3b), engaging relevant players from
school-based and community expertise (3c), crafting instructional practices
and supports to address specialized learning needs (3e). In Year 3, I feel I
have engaged competently in Standard 3.
In the realm of supporting the learning of adults, I continue to innovate
in the professional development I provide my site directors, borrowing and
amending the best practices that I have observed over the three years of L4L.
I have implementing the use of video to observe a classroom enabling the
observer and the staff person to watch the rerun in real time to gain insight
into their teaching and learning skills. I learned how valuable it is to teachers
and administrators alike to be able to learn with colleagues in their
implementation of a lesson. Using video eliminates the challenge of finding
replacement personnel so that peers can observe each other in real time;
because of the distances between sites for my personnel, this innovation
enables us to do what would be impossible to do otherwise. I have now
conducted research on this and find that this is becoming a best practice in
some environments; even OSPI is considering how, with protections for

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

student privacy, this approach can be used more often in our 21st Century
afterschool programs. I feel that my being not a practitioner allows me to
find innovations that another might not try.

Leading Change of Policy and Practice to Ready

Underrepresented Students to Succeed in Postsecondary Programs
(Standard 4).
A 7-year, $18 million dollar grant awarded in September 2014 will
change policies and practices with the following outcomes in eleven rural
school districts: more rigorous coursework (Advanced Placement, dual credit,
honors) will be offered, and more teachers qualified to teach them, to more
enrolled students from rural areas, students of color, students form poverty
and students learning English than ever before in these districts. In two
years, all qualified students will be automatically enrolled in rigorous courses,
a policy change from requiring students request to enroll themselves or be
referred by a teacher or counselor. Principals are now willing to implement
these changes as race-neutral (2b); I believe they are also race-affirming.
Another race and culture-affirming change (3e) is that districts will offer
middle school Spanish language clubs pipelining to new AP Spanish classes in

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

each high school, to affirm students Spanish language and cultural heritage.
I have hired a Spanish speaking evaluator who will engage with families and
conduct surveys and focus groups to help us understand how best to involve
our migrant and immigrant parents into our programs, and how to recognize
their culture in our instructional designs.
I have contributed to the capacity of educators to ensure a high quality
education for every student and to support these students college readiness.
After many conversations with principals and College Board representative
Nancy Potter, I earmarked resources (4b) to facilitate sending as many high
school teachers as wanted to attend to the College Board Summer Institutes
in Spokane or Bellevue, to improve teachers ability to differentiate
instruction and teach highly rigorous coursework. In addition, I have
encouraged and supported districts to pursue participation in AVID programs
for the benefit of their many students students of color and students learning
English who would be helped by this program.
I have built social capital in my years working with essentially the same
eleven principals such that I can engage them, from a teaching and learning
stance, in issues of equity and instructional effectiveness (2c). This spring, in
deciding how to spend a significant amount of carryover funds from our grant,
I invited districts to make proposals for a possible investment of up to
$50,000 per district to address or reinforce building a college going culture in
their district. Individual superintendents, their principals and administrators

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

invited me to conversations where we discussed ways in which they might

best spend this money. I allow each to design their own approach to meeting
grant goals. I am aware of other initiatives in their district and see no need to
counter or confuse what they are already pursuing. This flexibility and
respect for their local efforts has garnered me their trust. An example of
these conversations and the impact they can have on students and my
partnerships with districts occurred with the Wenatchee School District this
school year.
I invited the Wenatchee High School math department to consider the
Agile Minds curriculum for their freshmen math and algebra classes. This
curriculum has research demonstrating that the mix of instructional
approaches and the associated social/emotional and skill building support
worked well for student populations like ours. I was not promoting this
specific curriculum but did want to affirm this approach. In October, I brought
information from an Agile Minds presentation at a Rural Alliance meeting in
Spokane, circulating this information to my 11 districts, describing what I saw
and sharing the Agile Minds representatives business card. I continued
through my fall and winter meetings to continue to discuss math approaches
as our grant focuses on the primacy of math as a gateway skills for
postsecondary success. With this math issue kept paramount, when dollars
became available, I was invited to discuss with Wenatchee the possibility of
funding this approach for their math department. As this fit both the content

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

issue but also was an instructional approach that fit well for our students, I
approved the use of funds to purchase this curriculum and associated
equipment. Further, because the $50,000 would only fund half of the math
department, I acquired additional resources to enable Wenatchee to fully fund
this approach. I did this for two reasons: many students in these districts
would be helped immediately, but also, Wenatchee would be a great site from
which to conduct implementation research to understand how to bring in this
math approach and to determine if indeed, it did work for our students.

Building a Community of Practice in Support of Equity

- Standard 4
My ongoing approach is to constantly work to understand and develop
organizational structures and policies that improve the equity of systems in
which I operate or with whom I interact, by so doing building a community of
practice that will support my work ongoing. Each summer, my agency
supports the Sisters of The Sacred Name in Wapato to bring a group of 9 12
Mexican teachers to Wapato to provide culturally responsive teaching, all in
Spanish, to more than 100 students in 50 families in Wapato. I continue to
reach out to the local school district to be more aware and more accepting of
this initiative (mostly to no avail) but in this way I am promoting a vision of
deeply-engaging and culturally-responsive instruction. I implore Wapato
teachers to use this summer engagement as an opportunity to enhance their

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

adult professional learning to understand what parents seek in culturally

responsive teaching. I continue, and will continue, to do so (3a, 3e).
As the senior member of the Puget Sound ESD Board, I am promoting
the agency to engage in discussions with our partner districts on racial equity
policies in line with an ongoing agency initiatives led originally by Dr. Monte
Bridges, L4L1. In Fall 2014, the PSESD Board signed a Racial Equity Policy
indicating our awareness of the debilitating effects of racism on students and
families. At my urging, after signing that document, the board pressed the
staff to build an awareness-raising conversation on race and racism. The first
event was held as a collaboration with PSESD and WSDA for all 35 districts in
the Puget Sound service area on April 28, 2015. I am now pursuing language
that will help us anticipate a challenging equity issue: how do you provide
the right set of extraordinary (not-equal) support to those students the public
system has failed, to do what we can to remedy our past deficiencies?
Because I work with lowest performing high school students, and work to
prepare them for postsecondary opportunities, I am acutely aware that unless
something dramatic is done, it is too late for some of these students to catch
up with their peers. Extraordinary, much-more-than-equal efforts are
required to redress these past omissions.
I contribute to the strengthening of districts to adopt and implement
robust program self evaluations for accreditation purposes. For the past
seven years, I have sat as one of three Board member panelists approving

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

the accreditation process for the Washington State ESD association, engaging
in dialogue with ESD staff and co-panelists. The team subsequently made
changes to strengthen and legitimize this process. In my first year of
accreditation, we reviewed 12 schools; this May the organization will approve
80 schools, a credit to the reputation the process has earned. A special treat
for me was to have been lead on the accreditation panel as one of my L4L5
colleagues, Concie Pedroza, Principal, The World School, Seattle School
District came forward for accreditation on May 19, 2015 an opportunity to
serve my new Community of Practice.
My Evolving Leadership
The cast and style of my leadership is much more clear to me at Year 3
of this program. Strangely, this occurred as a artifact of program credit
requirements. In Year 3 of L4L, I needed to acquire an additional six graduate
credits to complete program requirements; others in the cohort had
addressed this requirement through coursework done in their Masters
programs or in defending their National Boards. My Masters level courses
were too old to be counted, so I had to take additional courses.
Serendipitously, I took coursework in an online university on Executive
Leadership in a Nonprofit Organization, reasonable given that I am an
executive in a nonprofit organization, although this was not something that
was front and center of this three years of work.

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

As I engaged in reading research from far-ranging literature bases, much on

leadership but not in the education realm, I recognized my leadership
something I had been unable to do working entirely within the educational
environment in which I have been immersed for three years. Here I found
language that named my quest for clarity in what I want to provide for
students in the term of agency. My original association came was from J.
Adair (Adair 2014) who discussed agency of children in early grade
classrooms, derived originally in the language of sociology, but also
sustainable international development, coincidentally the field my 29-year old
daughter is now pursuing. Agency for my purposes, taken from sociology
literature, is the capacity of an agent to act in the world (Websters). Adair
speaks of agency in the context of schools, with the notion that students
should have the ability to influence what they learn and how they learn it, so
as to expand their own capabilities to act in their own world; her work draws
on economic theories of human development, agency and capability. This
language finally define what I was seeking: not preparing student to meet
standards, rather preparing students to be agents in their own life to choose
where they want to go armed with the tools and capabilities to work to reach
that goal.
From Adairs intriguing article, I was directed to Stone-Johnson (StoneJohnson 2014) who spoke to educational leadership referencing a legacy of

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

leader theory from business, industry and international development. She

said:
No one school leader can do the work alone, and even if he or she
could do such work, it is not everlasting. Deep and lasting change
requires many people to do the work. The web that a responsible
leader weaves wraps multiple people into the ongoing process of
change (Stone-Johnson, 2014, p. 671).
This reference then led me to reading of Maak and the notion of social
capital, and I began to see the reasons for, and the value of, the years of
meetings I had had with the principals in the thirty-plus schools that I visit
each month. Maak, from the realm of business, spoke of social capital,
providing the ties that lead (p 320). He further speaks of the qualities of
responsible leaders: it is a key qualify of responsible leaders to act as a
weaver and broker of social capital to create that whole network map of
complex relationships of an agency and its stakeholders... (Maak, 2007, p.
332) that enables leaders and their co-created networks to reach broad social
goals.

From the language of Maak and Stone-Johnson, I recognized the

metaphors of broker and weaver to define my leadership.

Another reference from these disparate readings helped me put further
definition to my leader moves we are urged to recognize in L4L. A
reference to John Mezirows transformative learning theory (Kirchenham,
2008) brought me back to theorists from my undergraduate days in Political
Science at the University of Washington that helped me see the deep and

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

abiding foundation in education on which I have built my current philosophy

and point of view.
As I work in a rural environment among many conservative school
districts and must address the pervasive racism of caring administrators and
teachers who have not faced or reflected on (Standard 1a) how practices,
policies, and systems, both presently and historically, have created disparities
in the quality of learning environments and student success, particularly for
traditionally marginalized students, I recognize the work of Paolo Freire. I
see how I am, in bringing in Spanish language training and AP classes,
actually (modestly) using some of his language empowerment strategies to
have our students engage in a radical act by encouraging them to develop
their Hispanic culture and Spanish language in rural eastern Washington.
As I do this, I searched for a way in which I could bring focus to these
disparities and again am taken back to my undergraduate studies when I read
Kuhns The Structure of Scientific Revolution. As I move among my thirtythree colleagues, I find that I am changing the narrative of the norms in this
region by gently, repeatedly, asking/suggesting to my kind colleagues that
they see the value of change to find teaching methods that will allow our
Hispanic students and students from low income families to be successful in
our school settings. Ideas that I believed would take years to insinuate into
the practices of these schools (automatically enrolling qualified students
regardless of race, ethnicity or gender into rigorous courses for which they

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

are qualified; finding resources to ensure there is an AP Spanish class in the

high schools of eleven rural central Washington districts) are happening!
From a confluence of good-hearted administrators, my repeated behind-thescenes suggestions, the gentle admonition that this is the right thing to do,
the paradigms in the policies that undermine these populations are shifting.
To exhaust the memorable literature of my undergraduate years, from the
literature of international development, business and others, I no longer see
myself as a Stranger in a Strange Land.
One tenet of my leadership for which I have not yet seen literature
references I have coined, cross-pollinator, a metaphor that works in our
rural agricultural/orchard economy, but it reflects a particular leadership that I
believe I display. With a regular monthly meeting, among like-minded but
diverse colleagues, I carry ideas, issues, and strategies from site to site. In so
doing, I have built a network that supports all these partners. I believe I am
accelerating the rate of change, but doing so in an organic way. I further
support this network, and improve my social capital in this group because of
my other networks: that with the Puget Sound ESD and the network of
hundreds of schools and 35 districts with whom we work; with the 33
members of my L4L cohort network, from my many years working in K-12
education, in higher education policy, in international banking, in municipal
government. My breadth and depth of experience, my curiosity about the

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

world, my academic preparation all of this helps me to be a contributor to

change the right change in my districts.

Conclusion
My strength for my work is that my organization is now an
appropriable organization. which may provide access to, and
participation in, a larger network of people, or stakeholders.. Websters.
This is my value and my leadership. At the end of my third year with L4L, I
now call myself an educator with no irony. I have the sense of climbing a
mountain toward a peak shrouded in clouds; as I emerge through the mist I
see myself and view others, on other peaks, who will form my evolving
Community of Practice. It will include people from other sectors, and other
countries. I am ready to consider the ascent of the next peak.

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Barbara Peterson, L4L5, Year 3: L4L Capstone Portfolio

REFERENCES

Adair, J. (2014) Agency and expanding capabilities in early grade classrooms,

Harvard Education Review, Vol 84, No. 2.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herter and Herter.
Maak, T. (2007) Responsible leadership, stakeholder engagement and the
emergence of social capital, Journal of Business Ethics, 74-329-343. DOI
10.1007/s/0551-007-9510-5.
Kirchenham, A., (2008) The evolution of John Mezirows Transformative Learning
Theory, Journal of Transformative Education 6: 104, DOI:
10.1177/1541344608322678.
Kuhn, T. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Stone-Johnson, C., (2014) Responsible leadership, Educational Administration
Quarterly, Vol 50(4) p 645-675.

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