Peter Atkinson: January 2017

Reflections on The Supervisory Officer's Role

Family of Schools Lead Learner

From August 2010 to my retirement in January 2017, I performed the senior management role of supervisory officer (SO) with the Ottawa Catholic School Board.

The first discovery I made about the SO role was that it was actually two equally important roles that required constant balancing.

In this post, I will share some thoughts on the supervisory officer's role as Family of Schools (FOS) lead learner.

With my Family of Schools Principals leading an learning session

In my first year as an SO, I was assigned 13 schools as my 'family': Mother Teresa High School, St. Joseph High School, St. Francis Xavier High School, St. Nicholas Adult High School and the 9 elementary schools associated with Mother Teresa, St. Joseph, and St. Francis Xavier. Although there were several well-established expectations associated with this FOS supervisory role, including chairing FOS principals' and vice-principals' meetings, participating in formal school inspections (at that time called District Reviews), and conducting performance appraisals for principals, I was surprised to learn that there was some lack of clarity of goals and procedures associated with other traditional practices. A case in point was the informal school visits that I was expected to conduct 3 or more times a year at each school.

Compounding my angst in the FOS supervisory officer role was my lack of experience with and limited knowledge of elementary education, as I had spent all 28 of my years in education in secondary schools. When it came to working with elementary principals and visiting elementary schools, I suffered somewhat from the impostor syndrome and realized very quickly that I would be wise to do more learning than leading!

Some Impostor Syndrome Humour

Cartoon by John Atkinson https://wronghands1.com/

Fortunately, The Ontario Catholic Supervisory Officers' Association (OCSOA) offered a formal mentoring-coaching program for novice SOs. In addition to providing 4 quality mentoring sessions, featuring presentations by experienced SOs, OCSOA selected a mentor for me (Jody DiRocco from the Algonquin-Lakeshore District School Board) who had extensive background in elementary education. He is now Director of Education for Algonquin-Lakeshore DSB. I am greatly indebted to Jody for the resources and advice he shared with me during that first year.

Following discussions with my mentor and other superintendents, I decided to create templates with some topics and questions for my school visits. Topics included Operational Issues (ie. staffing, facilities, busing issues), Student & Staff Successes Worth Celebrating, and School Improvement Plan Goals & Strategies. The templates, which differed somewhat for each successive visit throughout a school year, were sent ahead of time to my principals and served more as guides for our conversations than point-by-point reports. Central to my school visits were learning walks with the principal through several classrooms in progress and follow-up learning talks with the principal.

A picture I took during my visit to a 'thinking' de-fronted math class at Mother Teresa HS

The focus of my school visits was on conversations with the principal. Recognizing that a teacher's responsibility is for the learning of his/her students, I believed that the principal's responsibility was for the learning of his/her teachers. The answer to Helen Timperlay's question to principals "Who is my class?" (as cited in Michael Fullan's The Principal) is that a principal's 'class' is comprised of his/her teachers. Thus, I challenged my principals to focus on how they could best create optimal conditions in their schools for their teachers to build their capacity and competence in facilitating student learning.

Recognizing both the formidable abilities of my principals as instructional leaders and my own limitations in some areas of instruction (particularly in the area of elementary education), I adopted a learning stance approach in my conversations with my principals and in my written reflections on our classroom visits. With respect to the latter, rather than give mandates or directions, I simply shared my observations and wonderings. Here are some examples of 'wonderings' I included in the reflections I shared with principals:

I noted that in some classes, students were using chromebooks and tablets to search the internet for pictures and information for their projects. In one class, students were using Google slides to make presentations. I am curious if GAFE (Google Apps for Education) is spreading at the school, and whether powerful literacy applications such as Google Read & Write are also being used.
With respect to the use of digital technologies, I did notice that reference was made on the bulletin board to student use of RazKids at home. I am wondering, however, how the use of RazKids is brought back into the classroom.
I am wondering though if the teacher-directed discussions could be followed up by individual student reflection through writing or representing tasks (ie. journal entries, drawings, etc.) and through group activities such as Think-Pair-Share.

I also asked Timperlay's question of myself: Who is my class? The answer I derived was that, as a FOS superintendent, my class consisted of my principals. Thus, I analyzed the observations from my learning walks and feedback from my conversations with my principals and structured our FOS principals' meetings around their challenges of practice related to teacher capacity-building and effective instructional practices.

A task for my principals at a FOS Principals' meeting

that focused on instructional leadership for math

Years later, I was delighted when I attended an August Ministry of Education session for district leaders in which psychologist Steven Katz presented his findings from a year-long inquiry he had conducted with public board superintendents on best practices for school visits by superintendents! Among Katz's findings were the following:

Think about using school visits as opportunities to learn about school administrators both individually and collectively;
Think about who's in your "class" and focus your work on them;
Be intentional about the purpose of visiting classrooms during a school visit;
Think about differentiating your school visits even within an individual school;
Think about preparing administrators in advance of your meeting;
The quality of reflection after a visit can be increased if you have more than your memory to rely on and reflect from; and (perhaps most importantly)
Be intentional and deliberate about how various support structures fit together; the school visit does not stand alone.

Of course, as a FOS superintendent, I also attended many special events at my schools each year. For example, over the years, I have attended staff meetings, School Council meetings, Catholic Education Week Open Houses, school liturgies, Christmas celebrations, graduations, and school anniversary celebrations. However, one of my favourite reasons for visiting schools has been to present service pins to teachers, particularly when they are celebrating 25 or more years of service with the Ottawa Catholic School Board.