HARBORSIDE ACADEMY
EL Education Credentialing Portfolio
EVIDENCE: LEADERSHIP STRUCTURES
LEADERSHIP TEAM
Harborside’s leadership team consists of six different subcommittees, including Literacy, Numeracy, Student Culture, Staff Culture, High-Quality Work, and Grading & Reporting. Each of these committees is led by a veteran teacher and has a direct contact staff member who connects directly back to the building administrative team. More than 25 staff members participate on these different committees.
Each committee is scheduled to meet twice monthly to work on the implementation of their portion of the Harborside work plan. The committee chairs oversee the work, but individual members of each committee take the lead on the different action steps within the plan.
Harborside’s School Designer, Sarah Miller, plays a significant role in supporting the leadership team process. Quarterly, committee chairs get together with Mrs. Miller and the administrative team at Harborside to talk through progress and challenges. This is also the time when committee chairs update administration on their hopes and needs regarding professional development time needed with the staff. Administration listens to all requests, then allocates as much time as possible to the committees who request it.
Mrs. Miller also provides a significant service to the leadership team committee leaders by working with each committee leader at these quarterly meetings to grow their own personal leadership abilities. This past year, before diving into the goals and action steps, Mrs. Miller spent approximately 45 minutes per meeting working with each team on the leadership and coaching skills promoted in the book, The Art of Coaching Teams by Elena Aguilar. The general idea here is that Harborside wants to support the development of their committee leaders so that each subcommittee can operate as effectively as possible. It is also worth noting that a directly stated goal of this work is to also help to promote the development of the people who give of their time to lead each team. It is our hope that teachers who dream of advancing in their careers at some point to be a dean of students, instructional coach or an administrator can develop and hone their leadership skills through the support and experience afforded to them within this experience.
Harborside is proud that we have experienced many staff who have been able to “move up” in their careers after being a part of the Harborside leadership team. Several leadership team members have moved into district instructional coach, dean, and assistant principal positions. We also have a few more staff members who are starting to apply for similar positions.
It is true that people being promoted and moving on from Harborside into various leadership positions could easily be viewed as a series of staffing setbacks. However, the Harborside administrative team has chosen to embrace this situation with all the positive energy possible. It is hard to lose good people, but if our school can become well known as a place where you can come to work while growing as an instructional leader, then in the end that will be a good thing for the organization. As an example, just this year we lost a staff member to be a dean of students and another to be an assistant principal at other schools in the district. That was hard, and those people and their contributions will be greatly missed. However, it is important to note that the quality of applicants looking to take their place was simply outstanding.
HARBORSIDE LEADERSHIP TEAM SUBCOMMITTEES
LITERACY
NUMERACY
STUDENT CULTURE
STAFF CULTURE
HIGH-QUALITY WORK
GRADING & REPORTING
GOVERNANCE BOARD
While instructional decisions are made mostly by administration cooperating with the leadership committees, the Harborside Academy Governance Board works to oversee all school policies, including ensuring that the Harborside Charter Agreement is followed in an effective manner.
Harborside’s Governance Board does include some staff members, but as a rule must maintain more than 50% membership that includes parents and community members. Principal William Haithcock is an active participant in each meeting, but holds no voting power.
The group follows a specific set of bi-laws and a charter agreement that have been approved by the Kenosha Unified School District (Harborside’s charter authorizer) and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
WEEKLY OFFICE MEETING
In addition to the leadership team and governance board meetings, the Harborside office team also meets weekly to discuss application and preparation for upcoming events. The office team consists of three secretaries, two counselors, three deans, our instructional coach, librarian, the parent/community liaison, and both our administrators. In these meetings, we handle a lot of details, make sure important planning does not fall by the wayside, manage the building calendar, and plan around obstacles that get in the way of progress.
GRADE-LEVEL MEETINGS
An important part of the instructional planning process happens in weekly grade-level teams. These meetings include all teachers from that grade level, the instructional coach and frequently an administrator. Expedition planning including interdisciplinary teaching, fieldwork, expert speakers and culminating events happens largely in these meetings.
GRADE-LEVEL STUDENTS OF CONCERN MEETINGS
Weekly, teachers and counselors meet with a dean of students to discuss students who might be struggling for one reason or another. Some students struggle or fall behind academically. Staff can have a multitude of options to put into place to help that student to demonstrate more academic responsible behavior. Those options include extra held during lunch, mandatory study halls, after school homework help. Students can also be paired with a student mentor.
Students who need academic support because they are struggling with the difficulty of the work can also go to a study hall or after school homework help to get academic help. However, this group of students can also be placed into a literacy or numeracy seminar class where additional skill-building classes are available.
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Students struggling with behavior, attendance, or another type of soft skill are also frequently discussed at the student of concern meetings. Daily check-in meetings with staff, mentors and many more interventions can be assigned to support students as they develop their own independent skills.
WORK PLANS / WORK PLAN WALL
The Harborside leadership team spends all of its time working to implement the Harborside work plan in a successful manner. The work plan at Harborside is a constantly changing document. Challenges are identified and progress is made. All of this is tracked and maintained on the Harborside Academy work plan wall. In Mr. Haithcock’s office, there is an old-time slate chalkboard that runs the length of his office. Built over the top of that chalkboard are six sliding 4’ by 4’ panels that each holds a poster-sized print-out of each committee’s work plan. To the right of each plan is a place identified for the collection of evidence and data. Last year, the school year started with six neatly-printed posters attached to each of the sliding panels. By the end of the year, there were numerous articles, charts, and notes pinned to each board. There was also a green and red marker scribbled on each work plan as adjustments and results were identified.
The work plan wall has been a nice addition to the planning process at Harborside. Leadership team committee chair meetings happen right in the same room. The work plan at Harborside is never put away and forgotten.
PERFORMANCE BENCHMARKS
Within the school work plan, Harborside also maintains specific performance benchmarks that are tracked over time. These benchmarks serve as Harborside’s “indicators” of quality and are tracked regularly.
These benchmarks not only exist within the work plan, but along with other school data they are also kept updated in a very public manner on the data wall outside of the Harborside main office. Data relating to test scores, attendance, behavior, scholarship, service, and academic intensives is on display for anyone to see. Harborside’s good, bad, and ugly data is available to be viewed by anyone who is interested.
Data relating to our school improvement/work plan goals is also maintained in our credentialing data profile.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
At the bottom of the Harborside Academy work plan, a professional development calendar is maintained. Allocating precious time is a particular challenge at Harborside. It is likely no surprise to anyone that Harborside’s six leadership committee needs, coupled with administrative needs, make time an incredibly valuable commodity at Harborside. Committee leaders at Harborside work with the administrative team to prioritize and allocate time to the varied needs that exist.
For the past two years, the professional development plan at Harborside has been dominated by the school’s official transition to standards-based grading. This work including bundling standards/building the report card for over 150 middle school and high school courses. The staff has also worked extensively to create comprehensive curriculum maps that ensure the effective coverage of standards within each of the learning expeditions. Staff have also all created master rubrics for each of the standards that they teach in their classes so they can go into their master rubric and copy and paste appropriate rubric lines at the top of each student assignment. Staff have also mapped out the number of times each standard is being assessed summatively in a document that we call the course SASM (Summative Assessment Standard Matrix). Finally, each staff member has worked hard to ensure that their academic intensive plans and course syllabi are directly aligned with their course curriculum maps.
This past year, after a dip in test scores during our first year of standards-based grading, Our staff has worked extremely hard on their course curriculum maps to ensure that each grade level is teaching each of the standards that should be taught and that we are assessing those skills at the appropriate grade level of ability.
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This year, Harborside also conducted a full audit of its own curriculum maps (which include at least two expeditions per grade level) by comparing how often standards were being taught in comparison to Kenosha Unified School District’s recommended coverage in their standard curriculum. Harborside also enlisted support from Suzanne Plaut, who put together a 15-page report making suggestions as to the frequency of the coverage of all standards.