Month: November 2018 (Page 2 of 2)

Discipline that Restores – Thought on HC 1 Leader´s Post 7.1

HC 1 Leader Post 7.1

Thank you, Jessica, for giving me a view of your workplace. I believe this is the first time I am responding to one of your posts.

You mentioned that one way you establish common ground at your workplace is to have good communication, holding people accountable, and making sure everyone is maximizing their strength. Lepsinger (2010) also suggests creating collective objectives to establish common ground (p. 179). Making sure that people are working for the same goals creates clarity. You also mentioned how the MVV is clearly stated and placed in areas where everyone can see them. I think that is still an area we can grow at our school. Although we often speak about our mission, our vision, and our values, we do not have them displayed in too many areas of the school. One way we establish a common ground at our school is offering every month training. These are times where we sit together of our or more and learn together about a particular topic or relevant issue that concerns us all. By learning together, we create a common ground.

You also addressed how conflicts are resolved in your organization and suggested how your institution would benefit from educating staff member more on conflict resolution. What we have done in the past few years is working with a particular material that I would also recommend to you. About three years ago we started to use the restorative discipline material from Claassen and Claassen (2008). Although they initially wrote it for a school environment, I believe it applies to any setting. They use very clear steps to follow. Conflict is not a problem but an opportunity for growth. Usually, when there is conflict, people are getting hurt, the goal is to restore those relationships. The starting point for Claassen and Claassen’s (2008) material is what they call the respect agreement. Not much different than what Lepsinger (2010) says about having a common objective. What we do at the beginning of every year, is write out a respect agreement between people in all areas or departments at our school. I do it with my leadership team, my teacher coordinators do it with their teachers, and the teachers do it with their students. We make ourselves accountable to each other before we start working each year. When anyone breaks that agreement, we remind ourselves about the respect agreement. If that does not work, we set up a meeting, etc. As a conflict does not get resolved and escalates there are particular steps to take. What we seek is to restore the relationship between people.

Blessings,

Reference

Claassen, R., & Claassen, R. (2008). Discipline that restores: Strategies to create respect, cooperation, and responsibility in the classroom. Ron and Roxanne Claassen.

Lepsinger, R. (2010). Closing the execution gap: How great leaders and their companies get results. John Wiley & Sons.

Strategic Planning – Evaluating our Festival de la Familia

Although we have had a very successful Festival de la Familia this year, we decided to do a thorough review because were detecting complaints from parents. We discovered that the festival gives parents from the lower grades a different experience than parents from middle school and high school. Our Festival de la Familia is a whole day festival primarily carried out by parents and students with the support from teachers. Each class has a stand where they sell food and organize games for children. The food and the game prices are all donated by the parents. It starts at 9 am and goes until 5 pm. Through the day groups can sing and play instruments, we have a pet show, and in the afternoon, people can sign up to compete in different sports. We charge a minimal amount for every activity. All funds that are raised this day go to support a school project that directly helps students.

During the review process, we did not follow the Strengths, Weaknesses. Opportunities and Threat Analysis (SWOT). We reviewed the positives and the negatives of the event among different groups, the leadership team, faculty, parents, and students. We asked more general perspectives from all the groups and possible solutions to any difficulties they identified. We collected all the information and placed it into a shared document. We have yet to sit down and review all the gathered information and find possible changes that could be implemented in the future.

I see that this process we did to evaluate our Festival de la Familia is standard for our school. We could improve in being more specific in identifying in the first place the opportunities and threats among the different groups. We also did not summarize each opportunity and threat to our festival. And, we did not identify possible outcomes and what could go wrong. We could go more in-depth with each group and use their knowledge and ideas to find solutions.

William R. King (1978) suggests that strategic planning requires attention to the organizational mission (as cited in Atha, 2018). I believe we did follow this principle as we mentioned the overall mission of the festival before and during the discussion and planning.

This review process is an example of how we generally work with strategic planning throughout the school. It shows how we can improve all strategic plans we make in the future.

Reference

Atha, D. (2018). Week 4 Post 4.5.  Course Learning Notes. Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/ldrs501/week-4-post-4-5/