Your one- page should be a summary and should be in the form of a bulleted list of points you want to share with your faculty. Think of this one-page summary as talking points for you if you were giving a speech or presentation to your faculty.
The Scenario- Think of the assignment as from the lens of a school leader. You have just read an important peer-reviewed journal artilce on a topic that aligns with your vision of effective instructional practices that you would like to share with your faculty. Looking at research as an instructional leader is important to retain a sense of relevance with educational change. But this can be a challenge too for busy school administrators. For this assignment you are asked to pretend that you are a school leader and that you have found a peer-reviewed journal article that hits exactly on the points you would like to emphasize with your staff. You are also asked to include one or two of the standards as listed below within your work.
Our authors, Gall and Acheson (2011), delineate the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards on page 41 of our text and these include:
Teachers are committed to students and their learning.
Teachers know the subjects they teach and how to teach those subjects to students.
Teachers are responsible for managing and monitoring student learning.
Teachers think systemically about their practice and learn from experience.
Teachers are members of learning communities.
Think through this process and these questions to guide you as you report on the journal article you have chosen and the standards/propositions our authors note on p. 41. Consider the bolded words the formal part of your paper and the non-bolded parts of the questions below as the more informal sections.
Section One
Why is the topic important in general terms for education?
Why is the work important to you specifically?
Section Two
What are the author’s positions and findings?
Which findings in particular resonate with what you believe is important?
Section Three
How does what the author is sharing relate to a relevant perspective in the general school setting?
How does what the author is sharing relate to a relevant perspective in your school setting?
Section Four
What impact could the findings of the author have in an educational setting?
What impact could the findings of the author have in your setting?
How will you use what the author has shared to change, impact, enhance the evaluation processes at your school?
If you want you may include the questions as listed above and format your paper accordingly under those headings.
Tip#1-Your paper is both formal and informal. The formal aspect is how you present the author’s points and discuss the findings and ideas of the author in general terms. For those areas of your paper be sure to refrain from using “I would,,” etc. The informal would be how you consider the author’s findings and ideas for your own setting. Thus, in the more informal sections of your work you may use pronouns such as “I” in terms of for example: As the Instructional Leader at Sunnybrook Elementary I would suggest that as a faculty team we engage in the process of careful attention to the use of data as mentioned by Smith (2014) when she shared “…the use of data in professional evaluations has increased over time as teachers’ test scores for student groups is analyzed” (p. 255).
Tip#2-When you are writing your paper you should not refer to the article you have chosen as “in the article” or “in the study” but instead share the specific title or author of the article you have chosen. You need to define what article, what study. There is an APA checklist of tips in the first section of our course that can be very helpful. Be sure to take a look at these helpful tips in the first section under Modules of our course.
