Results of my Division Head assessment

A pair of articles on the Harvard Business Review's blog network have hit home recently. The first was Heidi Grant Halvorson's post  calling for rethinking the common use of reflection alone as a means of gaining insight into the hidden areas of ourselves, based on the thinking of Timothy Wilson as laid out in Strangers to Ourselves - ideas I incorporated into my dissertation research on faculty supervision. The second is Anthony Tjan's post offering a simple recipe for successfully self-aware leaders: know thyself, improve thyself, and complement thyself. The goal of knowing myself was explicitly incorporated into the emotional intelligence work that I did this year, and I am a big fan of self-improvement as well, which is why back in May I asked the elementary faculty to complete a significant assessment about my work, (follow that link to see the entire device). 10 responses were returned (one of which was anonymous), which is a large enough sample to carry validity for the purposes of this project, and I spent some time this summer digesting the results and considering the implications.

I was excited by the areas that faculty identified as strengths in my practice:

Utilizes feedback to enhance effectiveness of the division

Maintains high professional standards and models behavior expected of others

Acts with integrity - Though not directly tied to a specific personalized PD goal, this was the most exciting result of this assessment for me.

Behaves in a manner that is consistent and fair

Listens carefully and with an open mind -  this was gratifying to see because it relates directly to Objective #1 of my personalized PD plan last year (to improve my communication) and Objective #3 (improve my emotional intelligence).

Effectively plans, organizes, and leads faculty division meetings -  this was gratifying to see because it relates directly to Objective #4 of my personalized PD plan last year (to improve my leadership of meetings).

Promotes positive, effective relationships with parents -  this was gratifying to see because it relates directly to Objective #1 of my personalized PD plan last year (to improve my communication).

And I was also excited by the areas that faculty feedback helped me identify as opportunities for growth this year:

Treats others with respect - While this is a decent response, I would like to hold myself to a higher standard and shoot for all respondents to see me as at least effective in this regard. 

Fosters an administrative structure that is responsive to teacher needs.
Teachers identified that while much of our admin structure and many of our institutional issues aren't necessarily my responsibility or authority, they would still like to have more regular meetings and check-ins with me on a 1:1 basis.

Encourages collaboration between and amongst faculty and administration.
Comments in this area ranged from "be more comfortable with executive decision-making" to "too directional to be fully collaborative", and from "I  like the approach of creating faculty task forces" to "delegate more transparently". What I take from these mixed messages is that I have work to do being clearer about when I am deciding, delegating, or being non-directional.

The last two growth areas get bundled together:

Offers appropriate feedback concerning curriculum and instructional issues.

Is able to offer useful feedback in lesson observations.
 While I was called "a master of objective observation", faculty were very clear that they would like me to be more present in their classrooms, do more observations, provide more feedback on instruction, and have more curriculum-design conversations - not to mention which, this would improve my understanding of both our program, and the developmental arc of our students.