Final Course Reflection 5396

REFLECTION-Week 5

I believe that the self assessment aimed to help me identify my own areas of strength and weakness to help me create an action plan for implementing change. It helped me address specific skills, such as communication, leadership, listening and social abilities, but it also helped me focus on more tangible abilities, as in my professional skills. A self assessment's subjective nature can call its accuracy into question. I will use a self assessment as a starting point toward personal and professional growth.  Itwill expose my areas of strength and weakness.  It is the first step in my development.

I feel that it will be a great tool to communicate with the other members of my cohort as well as others involved in similar higher educational programs and fields of interest.  I like the organization options given to make my wiki easy to use and allow members viewing my wiki to easily navigate through my pages and files.  Because of these organizational options I will be able to use this not only in my education in this class, but also throughout my professional career with other administration, teachers, and even the community.  This will be a great tool for keeping up with our ever-changing education system and initiatives.  I see this as a way to streamline comments for staff development and training in a multitude of different ways – to improve the training, give positive insights to the presenter, and to further discuss the training components.  This could also be used with a Professional Learning Community by being able to discuss trends in education with peers and colleagues.

What I learned from the interview that will improve my leadership knowledge and skills in this business is you’ve got to be doing a lot of things all at once, and you’ve got to be doing them in a fairly coordinated deliberative manner. I think you’ve got to have a framework for thinking about how you’re going to put them in play, and how you’re going to get your board and your community invested in supporting those sets of action plans and key objectives that you’ve set. Whether you call it a strategic planning process, goal setting process, action planning process, you have got to have one that genuinely engages your stakeholders, and gives the people a clear focus on what that is, and keeps them focused on that through the year.

I really enjoyed preparing my intern plan.  I really got to engage myself in the process of what a superintendent does in a way.  The intern plan will give me plenty of opportunities to interact with a variety of administrators, systems throughout the district and organizations throughout the district.  I will also be able to look at the different teaching/learning styles that are taking place around the district and in the classroom.  I also believe that the intern plan will help improve my skills in research, communication in groups, intrapersonal communication and observation.  I will also improve in personalizing learning and giving it relevance and meaning.  I also believe that I will become more effective in putting learning into context to improve understanding and the retention of certain concepts.  The intern plan also provides me with plenty of networking opportunities and when it comes to education sometimes, it is not always what you know, but it is who you know.  I think it will also help me learn how to adapt to change, being that I will be involved with a lot of stakeholders in this ever-changing education environment.  This will also help me grow emotionally and help me learn from failure and success.

I really enjoyed the discussion blogs and the web conferences throughout this course.  The web conferences were great because you could finally put a face with a name and get help with questions you had that had come up through the course and I think the discussion blog really served the same purpose, but there was just more participation.