Education Department Internship Field Experience

Journal Reflection
Intern Name
Date
Amount of
Time
5/24/16
2
5/25/16
3.5
5/26/16
2

ISSLC Domain
Standard 4 Collaborative Leadership
(CL)

Name and Description of Activity

Worked closely with the district communications specialist over the
submission of our next two articles
Attended a district professional development on Google Drives
Communicated with other colleagues in the building to collect
information about things happening in the building for our next
edition of the newspaper.
Reflections and Insights
This week I worked closely with the communications specialist for
our district in order to have two of our students articles submitted to
the Windsor Journal. Our original arrangement was to have one
article a month submitted, but I wanted to see if by the end of the
year we would be able to have two articles submitted on a bi-weekly
basis in order to ultimately create a scenario next year in which we
are submitting weekly to the local paper. The students have been
great with covering what has been happening in the building, and,
recently, I have found more ways to have teachers in the building
help keep the students up-to-date on what is going on in individual
classrooms and all around the building. However, I wasnt aware
until a school-based professional development that my colleagues
did not know that they could email me on what was happening
around the building so that I could send a student to report on the
event and that event could end up as a submission to the local paper.
I think this PD was a start to helping to create a better collaborative
culture in the building that doesnt just pertain to academics. While I
understand that collaborative cultures are not easy to develop, once
they are in place, they pay huge dividends (Green, 2013, p. 94).
During this professional development, I brought this up, and it was
really well received by staff. From that point on, I no longer had to
have the students hunt down events, but I have teachers email me
daily on what is going on and sending me pictures and short writeups when there is a field-trip or a guest speaker or an award that was
received by a teacher or student. This has tremendously enhanced
our student newspaper, and gave me the idea to try and start
increasing the number of submissions we could make to the local
paper as well. I received confirmation this week that both articles
were accepted by the district and were headed to the local paper for
publication. I would ultimately like to involve the Windsor Journal and
the department of communications in the decision making of which
articles we submit in the future because when the school is open to
collaborating with the community, connections can be made with a
variety of individuals, creating a win-win situation for all parties
involved (Green, 2013, p. 94).