Employment Application Material, part 1

After finishing my administrative masters degree and obtaining my administrative license, I began applying to principal positions in Shawnee Mission as well as several nearby school districts.  Last year, while experiencing a swell of parent support at Prairie Elementary, I halted the search for principal positions and expanded my plans to concentrate supporting students at Prairie.  This included Coleman's Camp, One-On-One tutoring, these websites, and an overall professional and personal connection with parents that is pervasively enriching.  The last two years have been a time of tremendous growth and reinvestment in being an exceptional teacher.  The parents of Prairie and the students of Prairie have caused me to reevaluate my plans and choose to remain at the school.  I hope to serve the community and continue my own learning adventure.  For the next few posts to Smells Like Burning Army Men I thought to share some of the material I wrote for my administrative applications in various districts.  I spent months writing, revising, and distilling my experience and perspective into short statements that were to be used to evaluate my qualities and qualifications.  Though I can readily find areas in the responses that could use additional refinement were I to apply to new principal vacancies, my plans of staying at Prairie mean this material may be relevant now primarily as information to the Prairie community.

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What are three strengths that make you a good candidate for this position?

The first of my three strengths is a diverse educational training that aids me in relating to and supporting those who have had difficult and troubled childhoods, especially in terms of conforming to, or being successful in, a traditionally structured educational environment.  As a child, my parents were psychologists at Rainbow Mental Health Facility on the children’s ward and my formative years were awash in child cognitive development theories and treatment discussions.  My parents shared with me stories from the ward where they counseled children abused, suicidal, or suffering from the most severe mental health issues.  This family profession became an informing backdrop for me when interacting with friends facing troubled home lives, understanding parental behaviors and decisions, and evaluating the world around me in analytical and sympathetic terms that set me up as an agent of change and leadership.

The second of my three strengths is broad professional opportunities, enabled by my passion and concern for the disenfranchised.  As a full-time, long-term substitute teacher at Della Lamb Elementary Charter School, I relieved and supported teachers in an urban core, inner city school servicing immigrant, low-income, at risk, and disadvantaged children in kindergarten through 5th grade.  I taught multi-grade, multi-ability classes in the year-round school with ethnically and racially diverse student body composed overwhelmingly of African Americans, Somalis, Vietnamese, Sudanese, and Latinos.  In the Shawnee Mission School District I am a ten year classroom veteran of teaching 1st through 4th grade and have served as a middle school paraprofessional.  I have assisted students assigned to the behavior disorder program, including students diagnosed with A.D.D./A.D.H.D., Tourette’s Syndrome, Asperger’s Syndrome, and children physically abused.

The third of my three strengths is unique leadership background, most notably in my position as an AmeriCorps* V.I.S.T.A. member (akin to a domestic Peace CORPS) in service with Public Achievement, a grassroots youth empowerment program started in Minnesota and funded here in Kansas City by the Kaufmann Foundation.  I became familiar with the structure, successes, and struggles of educational institutions by working on the development and sustainability of partners throughout Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, and Northern Ireland.  I advised and organized the application of youth empowerment and democratic processes between Coach and Site Coordinators, volunteers, parents, as well as administrators, instructors, and students at the elementary school, middle school, and university level.

Reflection on Baker University's Administrative Program

Tim Coleman

Final Program Reflective Evaluation

May 3, 2011

The past last two years have been an amazing period of growth for me as a teacher and as an administrator.  When I first applied to the MSSL program at Baker, I believed that I already possessed many of the skills and knowledge to be an administrator and that the program was most likely going to provide me with: legitimization of what I already knew, some additional background structure to administrative duties, and readiness to take the administrative licensure exam.  These expectations, in hindsight, are presumptuous, ignorant, and offensive.  I knew only the bare bones of what an administrator could do in a building and I realized that what I did know was limited to certain components I had firsthand experience with or that directly influenced my room as a classroom teacher.  The research, the professor life experiences, the reading materials, the Directed Field Experience, the continued work that mirrored what an administrator would do these were opportunities I desperately needed and was provided.  In addition, this always included the effort to stay aligned to real-world learning that would one day place me into a building with the leadership knowledge, skills, experiences, and dispositions of a principal.

I have always wanted leadership opportunities and to be a leader, though I often felt people around me did not necessarily view me as a leader even when I had the experience and the knowledge to take on the role effectively.  Over time I saw that certain personal characteristics were preventing me from naturally taking on these responsibilities: the way I approached conversations, the quality and type of information I contributed, and the perspective I brought to a group.  It was especially this last piece that I now see was the most underdeveloped.  At Baker I began to see that, even when approaching administrative decision making moments, I was still myopically oriented towards a regular classroom teacher’s viewpoints.  As such, my suggestions often contained too little information, only solved an issue for me, and did not take into account the many other people that should be involved in the discussion, let alone implementation and stakeholder buy-in.  Whether intentional or not, the people I interacted with before Baker accurately assessed my ability level and gave me the relative respect I deserved.

While at Baker I spent the predominant amount of time engaged in activities, projects, and discussions that worked to build a wider vantage point in terms of administrative roles.  During my first year at Baker this resulted in more people at my elementary school noticing my knowledge level increasing and my ability to understand building level decisions and actions better.  Such events were expected to occur when going through Baker’s MSSL program.  However, the revelation took place just this past year, my second in the program.  During this time I had completed most of my courses and was beginning my Directed Field Experience.  It was normal for me to share some of my learning with my grade level teammates.  As the year progressed they began to comment on how different my entire persona was in the school.  A few close teachers offered authentic, unsolicited praise for my handling of roles within the building where I served as an administrator intern.

I also completed several shadowing placements at different schools and grade levels.  So many attributes of the district came into clarity during this time.  I understood the overall structure of the district and the elaborate duties of a principal.  I saw how certain characteristics of mine could be recognized and brought out as a leadership vision.  I knew how to do many things as a principal not because I had seen another principal do them and I was blindly mimicking them, but because I closely observed leadership styles and actions, studied results, and compared what I witnessed to what I knew from class readings and professional research.

The habit of reading research and relevant information in professional journals, literature, conferences, and major news outlets became the bedrock of much of my decision making process.  A principal at an elementary school I interned at introduced me to the Marshall Memo - a bulleted synopsis of various articles and research findings collected from many sources by a retired educator who worked as a designated reader for people subscribing to the Marshall Memo.  In five weeks I had read more relevant research than I had in the previous five years.  As a matter of routine I began sharing research articles and journal pieces with teachers I knew were dealing with related issues, citing research and sending out information I thought might help the teacher.

When you have such a resource as your hands and you find the last few years of experiences and learning to be coalescing, there are moments and even days when you fully live the administrative role.  From the entry into the building you walk with confidence and feel that this is a world you understand and can positively have an impact in endless ways.  A seemingly unnerving array of situations might be presented to you at any moment and you feel you could handle them with thoughtful action.  There are dozens of informal conversations during the day in which you offer help, advice, or solve a problem for someone in the building, teacher or student.  You meet with your current principal and discuss items that affect the whole school and your participation is seen as a peer-to-peer quality.  You know the names of hundreds of students and just as many parents and have a mental database of relevant information that you can reference when stopping in the halls to talk with them.  Pictures of students at Wildwood for the 6th grade team, behavior interventions and assistance for a students with intensive behavior struggles, two parents in the hall needing information on third grade’s planned Kansas City field trip, and the office asking if you might be available to meet an opera group at the receiving doors who need direction as to where their gear can be loaded and “do you possibly have a few students we could invite to be part of our performance in 30 minutes?”  Of course!  Plan time is time to work the building and be a fluid administrator making time to be the lifeblood of the school.

From Baker I gained this confidence and exceptional organizational skills.  I began to develop process improvements in my teaching and in my administrative/leadership roles.  I initiated extensive paper and digital file mapping, maintenance, systemic structuring, and procedural efficiencies of routine actions or steps regarding the material I had collected during Baker classes and my own research materials.  The study of highly effective people led me to completion strategies, delineation of process components, prioritization, and elimination of non-relevant information, steps, and goals.  I actively sought out new information and was always incorporating it into the repository I have built.

Looking towards the next few years, my plans are to continue the expansion of my experience and responsibility within education towards the goal of becoming an elementary principal.  I have had tremendously enriching years in Shawnee Mission, as a student and as a teacher, though throughout my years in education I have identified a continual process of ever-widening appreciation, concern, and desire to have a wider influence on students beyond my classroom walls.  At times I have found collaborative opportunities or inspired staff to implement new methods or approaches to curriculum.  However, there is always a peripheral frustration that I may only affect the lives of the 20 or so children in my own classroom.  From district mentors, educational research, and numerous Baker administrative classes, I see how the educator I have become naturally grows to be the principal I want to be.

A pivotal component of the principal I want to be is a realization and drive to always be finding ways to set high expectations for student achievement.  To adapt my behavior to the needs of the current situation and be comfortable with dissent.  In a school environment in which the expectation is to accept children dealing with an endless array of real-life circumstances, the ability to adapt one’s leadership style without sacrificing one’s integrity is paramount.  This flexibility is a component of my daily personal interactions, instructions, and management.  As a principal, I do not want to approach every situation in the school with an identical set of standards and actions, but appraise each situation and provide a consistent leadership style that will successfully apply to the given situation.

The person I am today has been unequivocally shaped by individuals in the classrooms of my education, from elementary school to Baker University.  I have benefitted from dozens of teachers and administrators who spent many hours talking with me, working with me, encouraging me, cajoling me, and even outright confronting my self-enabled struggles when they knew I was manufacturing excuses or not giving my best effort.  Building from the foundational elements instilled in me by educators, I have become a dynamic, intelligent, caring, humorous, and compassionate educator who receives continual recognition from parents and the district for the work I do with all kids, especially those with exceptionalities.  It seems natural and right for me to now raise the level of my reinvestment in education as an administrator.  I see the character of the Baker as having seeded a fertile ground that will enable me to guide teachers and students as an exceptional administrator.

Summer Entertainment on Education - Reflection

Interesting article on films we all love and use for fuel to reach children, but some underlining negative tropes in terms of how we view teaching.

5 Reasons to Secretly Loathe Inspirational Teacher Films

Knowing You Did a Pretty Solid Job with Kids Because They Are Appalled at You

In the last day or two of school, as we had our various celebrations and reflections on the year, I showed a clip from the Fred 3 movie.  My boys like the movies and I can see the appeal through their eyes.  The kids in my class, however, were appalled at the sentiment of the song - "The Last Day of School is the Best Day of School."  A few sang along, a few joked about the message, but most were outwardly repulsed by the song's lyrics.

End of the Year Letter

Each year I had sent out letters to parents at the end of the school year.  Copied in below was one of them.

To 2^nd Grade Parents of Mr. Coleman’s Class,

As we come to the close of an amazing year of growth, achievement, and thrilling learning I am compelled to write a few words to all the parents who made possible this fantastic journey.  During the reminiscing and review of the photographs I took during the year, I was struck primarily with acute disappointment; it seemed no matter how many hundreds of moments I captured I could never accurately represent all the excitement and big breakthrough moments that happened daily in our classroom.  The kids exceeded established expectations of what 2^nd graders should and could do in terms of critical thinking, maturity, study habits, perspective, self-control, and wisdom.  The support and input from the parents has been the foundation for this exponential climb.  Everyday I tried to push each student and myself to make lessons and activities unique and memorable.  The atmosphere we created together became something other teachers, students, and parents talked about, and we thrived on being a special class others wished to be a part of.  The students earned privileges and undertook adventures others openly yearned for.

In many ways I am not a good teacher when judged by fellow teachers and the tiered education system.  I do not want my students to have the same opportunities and experiences as their peers.  I want a 2^nd grade year that is superior and impossible to replicate or emulate.  In the philosophical underpinnings of education there rages debates over the merits of being a “friend” with students or being a “teacher.”  I think of every one of my students as my son or daughter, and as such I am uninterested in seeing them become merely competent, obedient, or reach some consumer oriented pinnacle where they are celebrated for making “informed choices” in their purchasing and consuming patterns (look where those orientations have taken the country!).  With all honesty and sincerity, I want your child to be better than all the others, and I want to be the best teacher he or she will ever have.  I saw everyday with your child as an artistic performance, and my stories, my humor, my hard sell on education, my authentic relationship, and ever-rising standards were meant to see just how far we could go.

And far we did go.  Our effort to do more than the bare minimum was astonishing: our writing abilities were better than 3^rd and 4^th graders I have taught at other schools, our empathy to each other and our family was astonishing.  I hear positive parent feedback and feel the support, but I wonder if parents really know the depth and breadth of the scholarly disposition many students developed this year.  Students asking thoughtful questions, complimenting each other on new ideas, actual spontaneous applauding when a friend gets a tough new concept, offering to help, or outright defending each other if someone was unfairly reprimanded.  I told parents at the start of the year I would undoubtedly make mistakes with each and every child.  I made hundreds of mistakes and took great pains to point them out to the students, for humility, and for a model of self-correction and revision.  I admonished them, “we all have our struggles, I do, you do – that is what we are here to work on.  This is the place to work on those struggles.”  They completely understood what I was saying; self-analysis and change that many adults would fear facing.

I know parents spend long hours doing the hard work to build strong students with positive feelings about school.  I am very aware that I am a relatively small nine-month period in the education of your child and that before my class you have taught your children for those formative years and that after my class you will continue being the primary and most influential teacher for decades to come (yes, decades).  I have appreciated the many parents who volunteer for field trips, class parties, special events, and who show up daily to help with whatever reading workshop activity we are exploring.  I respect parents that spend the time to write me notes, call me, talk with me personally, or send in gifts to show they understand the effort I put into my students.  The Teacher Appreciation Week this year was one of the most heartwarming and generous; in lieu of flowers (that die L) I was awash in Diet Dr. Pepper, peanut butter cups, and real food every day.  The notes and gifts from students were so numerous I felt that I could never thank everyone.  I would be completely unable to have the successes, and I would not be able to meet the inevitable struggles of teaching, if it were not for the parents who are right there with me, involved in the nurturing and growth of children.  Daily.  Weekly.  Constantly.

The reality is that during the school year I spend more time with your children than mine, and they made the exchange worth it.  When I look at the pictures I want for my sons to have so many of the qualities I see the kids in my class exhibit: kindness, intelligence, and determination.  There is no comparison - these are the best kids – but word such truth carefully among friends with kids the same age.  It is a shock to see what your children have done with this year.

Thank you for sharing this chapter of your child’s life adventure.

Mr. Coleman

Pie-In-Face!

Photos of Pie-In-Face raffle I volunteer for each year at the Prairie carnival.  Fun way to help raise some money for the school while also creating a memorable experience for a lot of kids.

 

What Type of Label Do You Want for Your Child?

This article at The Week, How labels like 'black' and 'working class' shape your identity, is especially interesting to me as I am now fully invested in balancing the full-on parenting and teaching moments of kids with brains actively perceiving, creating, and begging for labels of all the new concepts and things in their worlds.  The acquisition of new words, that was a trickle in toddler years and impressed relatives at holidays just after entering preschool becomes, in the early elementary years, an exponential flood.  This is especially true for kids born to parents who use a large vocabulary around and with the baby (mentioned in this post).  The Week article exists at the intersection we can see in these two realities: Kids are busying acquiring words about the world around them, and, Kids are involved in explaining what they are doing and why (more on that below) and beginning to understand themselves, their sense of self and identity.

Words everywhere to explain and label the world.  Being developmentally centered on your ideas, your experiences, and your actions.  The explaining of what they did or why they did something is often taking place during discipline  "Why did you take that away from him?" "Why didn't you put the plate in the sink?" "Why did you do that?" - We are demanding a verbal accounting of personality, thoughts, and narratives from children awash in words.  We have heard them parrot back what we have lectured.  We have heard them give a possibly age-appropriate response.  And we have seen misapplication (or misappropriation) of newly acquired concepts when the child is flexing his or her lines of word associations to offer an actual reflective answer.  The words offered up can (and do, according to the article) become the words the kids use to explain themselves; to define themselves; to know themselves.  In a decade or so they might have high school teachers or university instructors introducing the psychological construct of the moment you were present for - when the student began to believe certain words were about him or her, that certain words were him or her.  The labels became the reality.  The Week article is primarily discussing the accuracy of the labels, where they come from, and what damage can be done.  A discussion on undoing those labels inside yourself is an entirely different discussion.  One best had with Alan Watts with his talks on not eating the menu for the food.