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

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

-2 9 11 20

-1 17 3 1 10

0 19 16 12 8 14

1 4 15 7 13

2 5 6 18

3 21

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.

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

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.