Leadership Skills and Experience

I enjoy the challenges and rewards associated with trying new things, and therefore I inevitably find myself in a position to influence events and inititiatives within my organization. Since enrolling in the iSchool, this tendency seems to have accelerated. I will focus here on three of the many successful leadership initiatives I have undertaken in the last two years.

Workshops on Demand

My first experience applying "the information perspective" occurred early on in my iSchool experience, as we were seeking new ways to train teachers and administrators in technology use at Wenatchee High School. As a building "Technology Resource Teacher," it is in our job description to lead these kinds of activities, but in the past they had generally been unsatisfying due to the wide range of skills and personal learning curves we encountered. The old model of "get everyone into a computer lab before school and show them" just didn't work--we needed to somehow personalize the approach via smaller, more focused groups, yet also take into account the limited about of time and money available for training. As a graduate of The Evergreen State College, I am familiar the with student governance model of the "Disappearing Task Force," or DTF, in which a problem is identified, a group formed to address the problem, the problem is addressed, and the group disbands. To me, it seemed the perfect model to apply to professional development in ever-changing and evolving information technologies. I, along with my colleague Gary Lorenson, developed the concept of creating "Workshops on Demand" (WODs) for our staff, in which a minimum of three individuals could identify an information need (in this case, related to technology), and request a workshop that addresses that need. The reception of the idea was enthusiastic, and almost immediately it was successfully implemented district-wide by our Instructional Technology Coordinator, Ron Brown.

Wenatchee School District Collection Development Policy

More recently, a book challenge at one of our local elementary schools led me to seek out our district library media collection policy, only to find that there was none! At the time, I had just completed LIS 522 with Lynnea Erickson, so while the issues and materials involved were still fresh in my head I discussed the problem with WHS Librarian Teri Fink, and on my initiative we put together a sub-committee of district elementary and secondary librarians charged with developing a comprehensive policy that would help us avoid many of the issues that created, as well as resulted from, the book challenge. The document was finalized in May 2006, and has been adopted as part of the Wenatchee School District's ISO Process Management System.

Strategic Improvement Plan

Undoubtedly my most significant leadership growth experience occurred in conjunction with LIS 580 in the Winter of 2006. When it came time to determine the focus of our group project, I volunteered to serve as the lead since the project timeline coincided with my leadership role at Wenatchee High School in the development of a "continuous improvement process plan" (CIPP) for our building. In this case I experienced an immediate correlation between my academic and professional work as the content of LIS 580 allowed me to articulate in concrete terms many the different approaches and underpinnings of good management. Prior to taking 580, I had always been an effective manager, but the structure provided by the coursework served to validate what had always been, for me, based on intuition and prior experience. For our class project we collaborated on the more manageable area of 9-12 literacy instruction. However, in my work experience, I have been applying the lessons learned while assuming a leadership role on a much larger CIPP plan that encompasses all levels of management at a large 9-12 institution. So far, the process has been slow, but successful. Our team's building CIPP model has been approved for 2006-2007 by the building leadership team and has been implemented at the department and building level.