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A Breaking Ranks exercise in skill development helps you evaluate and improve your leadership behaviors.
Given your hectic days at how can you possibly find to develop your professional skills? NASSP has identified 10 skills that serve as the behavioral foundation for effective school leadership, which are fully discussed in 10 Skilb for Successful School Leaders, a key publication of the Breaking Ranks Framework. Although there are multiple ways to build your capacity pursue professional development in these areas, using a pre-performance planning strategy is a good way to increase your understanding of the skills and apply and practice them the job.
To illustrate how the pre-performance planning strategy for skill development works, consider the lowing situation.
You have scheduled a meeting with a teacher at your school in early November. The teacher has been on the faculty for two years and is facing a final tenure evaluation in the spring. Evaluations for the teacher's first two years indicate that the teacher has been progressing nicely as a beginning teacher and has real promise of becoming an excellent teacher. Recently, you have received reports that the teacher is often unprepared for class and assigns students silent textbook reading during class, has been slow to return assignments and tests, and has not been available to meet with students after school.
Before the meeting (preperformance], examine the skill dimensions and their descriptors of practice (see figure 1} to help you plan for the meeting and give yourself an opportunity to practice and develop greater skill capacity. First, consider the 1 0 skills. Which of these skill dimensions are essential for an effective meeting with this teacher? Before answering, you should know that there is more than one correct answer. You will select and prioritize skill dimensions that are consistent with your leadership style and your strengths. An easy response is to state that all the skills will be needed, but you cannot focus on developing all of them at once. Which are the most important skills that you will need in this situation? Here is a quick overview of the possibilities for some of the skill dimensions:
* Setting instructional direction provides focus for the effort to improve the teaching and learning
* Teamwork affirms...