School returns next week, and that means I should start piecing together some of the things I’ve learned from through out the summer. I’ve had a pretty epic summer, and was able to participate in a number of really cool things all of which would be good to discuss with the math department when we get back. There’s also the thinking about the thing I want to personally commit myself to for this school year, my #1TMCthing.

The ideas from Chris Shore’s morning session have come first in my head. One of the things he talked about the two-way communicator role played by those who support teachers. The top-down way of communicating to them the school administrations directives, and figuring out what that means for their classes. Just as important is the bottom-up responsibility of communicating the math department’s goals and needs to the administration, and the district. In two years of being the department head and the AP, I’ve managed to avoid both of these roles. Instead I focused on shielding the department from contentious parts of the admin plan, while also not really portraying a full picture of the concerns of the department to the administration and choosing instead to only talk about the rosy positive items. The math department doesn’t to be shielded. Challenged, as well as championed but not shielded. So how do I challenge the team to live up to the highest of expectations, while also championing their good work and looking out for their concerns?

Coming up with that question was a huge lightbulb moment in the conference and made me excited to come back to school. I want to change my role with the department, and perhaps change the department after that. The first step is to make sure that we are all clear on what the work of the department is. To clarify what that work is, my initial goal is to come up with a vision for the department. The vision can incorporate the needs of the school and the district, and also the realities that the teachers face. It can be a way to look forward at what we want math to be, and also help us create realistic checkpoints that illustrate what we should focus on right now. It should be cool. I just have to figure out how we go about our ‘vision crafting’. Here’s what I got so far:

  1. Figure out the administrative ‘asks’s for our math department. The exact nature of the demands will be hard to nail down, and I say that knowing that I am a member of the administration. In the past few years we have had some conversations about what the math department might want to do, but we haven’t come up with clear items that we want to ask that they look at. Looking at these will be constraining, but constraints lead to creativity.
  2. The next step is to come up with a process that genuinely surfaces the needs of the teachers. An honest process that brings up the genuine needs is preferred over the approach of my using my position as an administrator to push a prepackaged vision. If step one goes well, it should be clear what room things are required, and hopefully we can be genuinely honest about the rest of what we do.
  3. Next is tying our math work to the areas of focus for the school as a whole. Transfer schools always mean a widely varying student population, how do we deal with that as a math department. Add on to that, our external learning focus, our project based learning focus, and our Restorative Justice focus, and you have a lot of things that teachers have to consider. For the vision to be enduring, I need to be really sure that the vision is connected to what the school values.

That’s what I got so far do you have any idea about how I can do this? Please let me know in the comments.