Transformative Principal

Systematizing Our Professional Development For The Charter School with Amanda Huza Transformative Principal 320

Social Media: We’re not wasting the time of teachers who have already mastered that aspect of teaching.

Amanda Huza is the principal of Equality charter school.

• Serve about 630 middle and high school students in the bronx.
• Share space with two other partner schools.
• 27 teachers - 50% of them are new or 2 years or less.
• Important to accelerate their growth.
• Want them to feel successful enough to improve student learning.
• Data-based professional development.
• Focus on 10 pieces of Danielson framework.
• Create rich cultures of learning, routines and procedures, logical consequences in the classroom,
• Provide examples and non examples.
• Informal observation on a weekly basis. Teachers know that someone could be in classrooms at any time.
• higher order thinking questions and wait time. Scaffolding questions.
• Focus on specific areas of mastery and track those.
• We’re not wasting the time of teachers who have already mastered that aspect of teaching.
• The list is not concrete, we want to think about the people that we have in front of us.
• Scholar data as well.
• 1–2 day opportunities for teachers to be learners themselves.
• Peer observations.
• coaching role and supervision, then principal position.
• goal is expanding to elementary school.
• Systematizing our professional development for the charter school
• Building up to socratic seminar.
• Get feedback from their peers and from their coaches.
• Large group of kids who need intervention.
• Footage of a demonstration lesson, then feedback from peers.
• Swivl
• Edthena
• Can see videos of exemplars in their school.
• Teachers are on an equal playing field.
• Helps the administrator move away from being a judge.
• To put the pressure on you to remember everything is really unkind to both the administrator and the teacher.
• There’s pretty much always someone coming into the classrooms each day.
• Informal observations happen weekly.
• Weekly coaching meeting.
• Coaching meeting is a debrief of the observation and a review of the data.
• Provided weekly lesson plan feedback.
• Video is 1 time per month at least, sometimes more if they are in higher need.
• Explorations in EdThena.
• Teachers create a professional development support plan.
• Weekly professional development time on Tuesdays.
• Quarterly data meetings.
• How to be a transformative principal? Don’t forget that the work that’s happening is the most important work and the work we used to do, so we need to not be afraid to learn with them.
• Really helps teachers feel supported and valued. amanda.huza@equalitycharter.org

• Simplify and streamline technology
• Save teachers’ time
• Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
• Improve student performance on state assessments