Lauren K. Zebula
I chose to concentrate my Master of Arts in Education on Preschool through College Leadership (P-16). This concentration allowed me to research and discuss the traits that make a good leader as well as what being a leader means in the context of a school. I also discovered the various roles that leaders in eduction fulfill, whether these roles are formal, administrative roles or informal, teacher leadership roles.
It became clear to me throughout my master's program that the most essential role of a leader in a school setting is to be an instructional leader. This entails a wide range of activities from planning and providing professional delvopement and facilitating professional learning communities (PLCs) to individually developing teachers and finding ways to work with diverse groups of students and families. There are many qualities that help an educational leader to be successful in these roles of which knowledge, interpersonal skills, and technical skills are just a few.
Below you will find a sampling of my work which demonstrates my learning and progression towards becoming a leader in education.
Education Leadership Showcase
The assignments below demonstrate my ability to create a year long plan for professional learning, while considering the materials and money needed to make the plan come to furition. Planning staff development is an intensive process, which I got to see through each part of this planning process.
These pieces were created as part of a couse in which we focused on leading teacher learning. I learned how adult learners best learn, how to plan professional development sessions, and how to help teachers grow in their profession using coaching, walkthroughs, feedback, and a variety of other techniques.
In the case study analysis below, I explore parental support in our schools. Through both literature review and my own experiences, I attempt to answer the questions: Why does parental involvement vary so greatly from one school to another? What are best practices for schools to successfully collaborate with their families and operate in their communities? Finally, what effect does a successfulschool-community partnership have on student behavior and/or achievement?
This case study was written for a course in which we focused on the variety of different students and families that we work with in our classrooms each day and the unique abilities, values, and perspectives that they bring with them.
Staff Development Plan & Budget
Increasing Parental Support in All Schools
Exploration of Family & Community Invovlement in Schools
Professional Portfolio
In pieces of work below, I examine and find research-based solutions to an unique case study centering around work-based sexual harrasment. In this particular study, a principal, who attempts to terminate an unsuccessuful teacher, is sexually harrased due to her sexual oreintation to the point that she eventually decides to just keep the teacher to avoid futher problems. Here you will find both a PowerPoint presentation as well as a webpage that I put together, along with Maria Samaniego, analyzing and proposing appropriate solutions. It challenged our ability to deal issues in a school but it also pushed us to find appropriate solutions to difficult yet common problems.
The Right Solution
The piece of work you will find below showcases the research work that I completed on outside invovlement in schools. It includes an extensive review of the literature surrounding family and community involvement in schools, its benefits, and best practices as to how as an adminstrator or teacher leader one can effectively involve families and the community partners, in order to provide an enhanced learning experience for students.
The professional portfolio below not only showcases my learning and work from the Master of Arts in Education program, but also ties together my past and present goals, my time in the program and my thoughts about the future as a learner beyond graduating from the program. It is intended to showcase me and my work to prospective employers as well as professors.
In the work sample below you will find my final PowerPoint project in which I present a case study of one of actual students, who lacked motivation and rarely completed his work. I used the progress monitoring strategy to help monitoring his work completion rate, to help motivate him to complete his work, and to find where he was still lacking motivation. This was just one of the challenging behviors I learned to work with in CEP 832.