In 2010, I was teaching part time job share on a stage 1 class at a South West Sydney primary school and had the honour of being led by my husband (acting assistant principal for stage 1) and Carolyn (Draper) Mozayani, Deputy Principal.
Working with my husband as my supervisor (something that had already been successfully attempted by another married couple at the school) was an interesting challenge of professionalism. He also supervised my job-share partner and it was very difficult not to come home and vent my frustrations to him. He helped me see how to better communicate with her via a communication journal and to make sure that the communication between my colleague and myself was being correctly encoded and decoded.
Working with Carolyn was an absolute dream. She was the most kind and patient and positive person with whom I have ever worked. She unfortunately passed away with cancer in 2015 after getting married and having a child (her biggest life goals). But the memories of her and the professional development she offered, remain. Her main mantra was for students to always witness calm, patience and kindness in words and actions. She also helped introduce several whole school initiatives, including a ‘building a community of practice’ how does it look, sound and feel (unpublished) document (image below):
In this document, it is interesting to note that data collection is the first item on the list, yet I felt no stress or pressure regarding its implementation (unlike my stress during other whole school data collection initiatives at different schools in the last three years).
I want to honour her memory and leadership by trying to build a community of practice myself. But before we try to build one, what exactly does a ‘community of practice’ actually mean? More on this in Assessment 2!
In terms of networking and collaboration, being on the social club / committee is key for the TL! Why would people want to collaborate with you if you hide in the library and fail to socialise? “Get out there gorgeous!” as Carolyn would say.
In terms of peer-to-peer professional development, I’ve utilised my knowledge of SMART goals (from a previous blog post), my knowledge of NESA teaching standards (through my 2009 NESA accreditation and 2019 maintenance), training in the GROWTH model of building capacity in others (2008) and my training in Quality Teaching Rounds (2017) to create some templates for collegial and self evaluation of teaching and learning lessons, (which I’ve also put up as links in the left menu of this blog, alongside the other leadership tools that I had put there from previous CSU TL courses).
I suppose I will have to keep reading the modules to develop more ideas on building a community of practice, like how to write a vision / mission statement and how to write a strategic plan…fingers crossed it all comes together!
