Introduction

Early in my journey through my master’s in educational leadership, I am passionate about

a desire to find out if there is a correlation between physical activity and academic achievement.

The first internship reflects my search for additional research relating to physical activity levels

of kids in a school day and their academic achievement. It also intends to gain understanding into

the role that administrators play in implementing schedules that promote opportunities for

physical activity, while balancing the need for students to receive adequate minutes of

instructional time in the classroom. I hope to use my school, Vimy Ridge Academy, and the

change to scheduling that we recently underwent in order to analyze the data to see if there is any

correlation between amount of physical activity and achievement of students at the junior high

level. I hope to pass along this data to my vice principal to provide him pertinent information as

he constructs the schedule for next school year, while also learning the about the challenges

leaders face in implementing this kind of change and the leadership strategies that could help

create a positive learning environment for students and teachers alike. And so, the journey

begins.
 Internship 1 in Student Services – Log (40 hours)

October – December, 2017

Time Activity Reflection and Comments

30 minutes Meeting with Was able to better understand the importance of teacher

Principal leadership and how teachers can assist the principal with some of his

to discuss leadership responsibilities. I find Michael Fullan’s discussions on leadership from

roles of teachers in the middle applicable to some of the ideas shared by the principal. I

the school think that all teachers can play a leadership role particularly in the area

of school improvement.

25 minutes Meeting with Vice With a staff meeting going on today after school, the meeting earlier in

Principal to finalize the day with my Vice Principal gave me insight into what he thinks will

internship plan. be the most valuable takeaways from this internship as far as what the

school can use. We want to see if student achievement has improved,

declined, or remained neutral during the first term of 2017 compared

with term 1’s from previous years. I was pleasantly surprised with how

valuable Michael Chute thought this research could be to him- stating

that this is information he had hoped to compile himself but has not had

the time to permit it.

80 minutes Reading an article On our list of additional resources for this course, there is an article by

relating to critical Ben Miller titled, Brookfields Four Lenses: Becoming a Critically

reflection Reflective Teacher. I read over this today and did some reflecting on

how it could apply to my internship and my development as a teacher

and leader.
 It relates to current experiences at work because I have a student

teacher with me for two-thirds of my day. This is the fourth student-

teacher I’ve had and I always seem to enjoy the opportunity because it

forces me to reflect on my own teaching. As you sit back and observe

someone else teaching your class, you can’t help but wonder how you

handle specific situations differently or similarly to the apprentice. I also

find that I am able to better comprehend the growth I have achieved in

my profession as I sit and see mistakes being made, but am aware that

they are the same mistakes that I made when I was just learning.

Sometimes skills needed in the teaching profession are only acquired

through experience of trial and error. As I reflect on the growth of my

skills as a teacher, through points made in Miller’s article, I also realize

that I have grown as a reflective teacher. This masters course is allowing

me to incorporate theoretical literature into my reflection and the

Leadership Practices Inventory enables me to reflect through the

experiences of my colleagues, rather than just an autobiographical

perspective (Miller, 2010).

25 minutes Google doc group This was a chance to get feedback from staff on the new schedule. We

collaboration during wanted them to identify what elements they like about the schedule,

staff meeting for staff what are areas of concern, and how they believe the schedule could be

feedback. improved. I plan to take this data to analyze it and present it to the

admin team so that they know what staff are seeing. I also want to be

able to compare it to see if perception meets reality, regarding what the

data might actually tell me. With all programs at the school now getting

at least 60 minutes per day of physical activity, will we see an increase in

their academic achievement, as research from Donnelly et al,

 Hassevoort, and Brasseau et al. or will it have more of a neutral or

negative impact as other studies have shown.

90 minutes Writing proposal and Although the internship is in its infancy, I know that I have to find a clear

going through objective for the next 5 weeks. I have some ideas that I think can work

research to finish and, having talked with my vice principal, I think there is value in

summary of working through some of my ideas. The challenge over the rest of this

internship and week and throughout this internship will be ensuring that the data

objective. collected and the direction I go is not only valuable, but also practical for

the time restraints of this internship.

60 minutes Research relating to As part of my internship, I am hoping to continue investigating whether

connection between there is a positive connection between the amount of physical activity a

schools and physical student receives and their academic achievement. With the data I’m

activity of youth. collecting at my school- a sports academy- I want to also find out the

role schools can play in providing this physical activity.

Today I spent time looking for articles that could provide research in this

regard to help ensure I can use the actual data collected from my school
Gutierrez et al. 2016
and support it with peer reviewed data.

This pursuit led me to an article by Gutierrez et al. that looked into the

role PE and recess at school played in helping students achieve their

recommended daily physical activity. The group examined were grade 6

students and the measurement of activity was based on recommended

steps in a day (12,000), rather than amount of time spent being

physically active. The article recognizes contributing factors to students

 not receiving enough physical activity throughout a regular day which

included a lack of safe areas to play, lack of community recreation

programs, increased amount of screen time, and economic reasons

(Gutierrez et al., 2016, p. 175). The article once again reiterates the

important role schools can play in helping ensure students are physically

active, given the amount of time they spend in school in a standard

week. They find that students can achieve more than 17% of their daily

recommended steps in a PE class (Gutierrez et al., 2016, p. 175). The

interesting result of this research was how significant recess and lunch

breaks were with regards to physical activity levels. The authors found

that the steps during unstructured play time at recess and lunch were

nearly equal to the steps achieved during structured PE classes

(Gutierrez et al., 2016, p. 182). This reminded me of research I have

come across relating to my annotated bibliography that emphasized the

importance of policy making recess and lunch breaks mandatory and a

meaningful amount of time.

70 minutes Data collection In the evening I spent time going through the spreadsheets that were

passed along to me by my assistant principal so that I can take the data

and find averages through different subjects dating back 5 years. The

hope is that this data will inform us on whether there is a correlation

between the amount of programming time our students are receiving

and their academic achievement.

100 Working on data Data collection continued today. I spent time pulling the data from

minutes collection (2013- massive data reserves in order to apply it in meaningful ways. I’m

2014) starting to spend more time thinking about the best ways to display this

data. It will have to be visually appealing and simple to follow. Rather

than numbers on a spreadsheet I am thinking that a bar graph may be

more suitable. The collection of the data is turning out to be very

tedious and time consuming.

120 Research collection Upon doing some reflection today on physical activity in schools, I

minutes and article search became interested in what the original purpose of physical education

was to see if it could help provoke any thought as to rationale for a

change in the amount of physical activity in a school day. I also thought

it might help me demonstrate the need for a change in the amount of

physical activity in a day based on the fact that society today is a lot

different than society was when the original school experience was

developed. Through this search I came across an interesting article by

Ian Culpan titled Physical Education: What is it all about? The muddled

Puzzle. In this article he provides some historical context to the original

purpose of physical education in schools. He associates it with the idea

that it would be preparing peoples bodies to be able to participate in the

workforce of a capitalist society (Culpan, 2005, p. 1). He provides

research that credits physical educations survival through the

acceptance of capitalism and all of the benefits associated with it

(Culpan, 2005, p. 2). This has since evolved into physical education being

driven by state prescribed curriculum and now its primary focus is to

provide physical education in order to encourage physical activity

(Culpan, 2005, p. 9). He cautions that as states continue to adjust and

 adapt physical education curriculum to reflect modern society and a

changing population, they need to be careful not to produce “uncertain

and muddled thinking around physical activity” (Culpan, 2005, p. 19).

Since a lot of the research I have done emphasizes the importance of

policy, this is an important article for me to understand. It’s conclusions

mention the potential issues of incorrect implementation of policy,

which would ultimately have a negative impact on students health or

could have negative unintended consequences.

135 Proposal for As I continue working at my internship, I am starting to figure out what

minutes internship this assignment could and should look like. Even though I felt like I had a

(submission) clear direction in my head, actually sitting down to write the proposal

proved to be very challenging. I know that I want to be able to gather

data to provide my schools administrators with empirical evidence to

support any necessary changes in the schedule and I also want to collect

as much research as possible to support the direction that we go.

However, there is a lot of data to collect and not much time to collect it

in. There are also numerous other factors that will contribute to

decisions the administration must make and there is a possibility that

the data collected wont demonstrate relevant patterns. I still want to

move in this direction but think that, as stated in my proposal, the

objective will be to inform based on research and less on data collected,

although I still believe their is value in collecting and organizing the data

as originally intended.
70 minutes Research relating to Today was a really interesting research day. From the outset of my

internship proposal. research, I wanted to be aware of my own personal bias (I like being

active and work at a sports academy) so that it does not influence my

findings. With that in mind, the article I reviewed today from the Journal

of Science and Medicine in Sport by Maher et al. is the first article I’ve

encountered that had what seems to be a very good argument showing

no correlation between physical activity and academic achievement. The

authors even found that higher sedentary time is related to better

academic performance “across a variety of academic domains” (Maher

et al., 2015, p. 1008). Interesting to note is they find that sedentary

behaviour is positively related to non-physical outcomes, but physical

activity does appear to be related to higher numeracy and writing

outcomes (Maher et al., 2015, 1008).

130 Read two resources “Leadership in the middle” was an article recommended to the class as

minutes relevant to the topic: part of our Educational Leadership masters pursuit. It was a valuable

“Leadership in the read early on in my studies for a few reasons. I found it valuable to read

middle” by Michael that Top Down flat out doesn’t work. While reading this part of the

Fullan article, I couldn’t help but reflect on district initiatives and school policy

and chapters 1, 2, and or procedural changes that have occurred during my teaching

3 from “The Challenge career. We are currently focusing on Literacy and Numeracy and I see

of Change” by the district trying really hard to employ this leadership from the middle

Michael Fullan approach. Schools have a lot of autonomy and they have provided

specific professional development days with a focus on collaboration

throughout my schools catchment. This, to me, is an attempt to utilize

proven leadership that works- leadership from the middle. In contrast,

this year and the end of last year I have had to spend significant
 amounts of time rectifying issues and coming to understanding

regarding the governments launch of bill 1. I have no doubt that it is

well-intentioned, but because it was a Top-Down approach to trying to

fix a problem (making school more affordable and having the same

access for all students) it became very frustrating for people tasked with

adapting to it’s implications. After reading this article I feel like I could

make suggestions regarding making the same changes, but through

leadership from the middle in order for it to succeed. It was also

interesting to read that the opposite also does not work. Sometimes in

leadership the tendency might be to try and empower people by

allowing them to make their own choices. As the example that is given

out of New Zealand shows, this also has negative consequences. The

Ontario model of leadership from the middle is one that I think can be

looked into much more closely. I also hope to better understand the

stated 6 “c’s” of this leadership model (character education, citizenship,

collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. It is

exciting to see these pillars being used in Edmonton Public School Board

today.

30 minutes Discussion with Colleague: Rob Schmidt- teacher and director of SportFit program.

colleague regarding Challenges in this program, what he is hearing from students.

schedule change. He is a unique perspective because he also has two children at the

school (Grade 10 and grade 8) who are in different programs but were

impacted by the change.

 We discussed what he saw as challenges and positives with the new

schedule from a teacher perspective, a parent perspective, and then

what his kids are saying about it.

It was interesting to hear so much positivity however he mentioned that

his kids are having to spend lots more time later in the evening catching

up on school work. They are motivated kids so make time to do it but he

discussed concerns about other kids who would not put in that time (i.e.

too much physical activity throughout the day impacting their

academics…).

90 minutes Kalantari & Again, pursuing the topic of physical activity and academic achievement,

Esmaeilzadeh (2016) I went searching for studies that, in their conclusions, had more

definitive findings on whether or not there was a connection and

whether that connection was positive or negative. This research finds

that there is a “significant” correlation between aerobic fitness and

better academic achievement, but not physical activity and muscular

fitness (Kalantari & Esmaeilzadeh, (2016), p. 27). In the article the

authors point out the variety of findings that are out there relating to

physical activity and academic achievement, so they wanted to separate

physical activity into different categories to see if the type of physical

activity would have an impact on results. It is very interesting to me that

they were able to be so certain with their results. The amount that they

use the term “significant” in their findings is why this article stood out to

me.
120 Working on compiling Once again I went to work pulling data from large files that were

minutes data from school files provided from my administrator and breaking it down into cohort

averages from each year during term 1. The theory behind only

collecting from term 1 was that it would allow me to compare previous

years to this year (with term 1 having been completed so far). The

trouble that I am running into is at the grade 9 level. At our school,

because we are a grade 7 through 12, our grade 9’s are semestered. This

means that I can’t really predict with any certainty patterns in grade 9

achievement because it could be a vastly different group of students

each year from the next. For example, one year the social studies

honours class may go in the first semester, but honours english wouldn’t

go until the second semester. In this circumstance, the social studies

average would be much higher than the english average, while not

reflecting any sort of correlation with activity levels, but rather a higher

academic achieving group. This was not a consideration of mine prior to

starting the internship and is a set back regarding the usefulness of the

data. However, I can still use the information from other grades and it

has given me the idea that, to do this data collection properly, it really

needs to be information from the entire year, not just one term. I think

that this is causing me to think I should focus more on the process of

administering change and some of the research based changes that can

be made (using article research rather than school results data) to a

school schedule.
90 minutes Data collection from My work continued on the tedious task of rendering the massive

school files amount of information into simple cohort averages from each of the

previous 5 years- term 1. Although I am worried about the usefulness of

the data once it is all collected, I want to see the process through

because it may end of being that the data is useful in another capacity

moving forward. This is already a good learning experience regarding

how important it will be for me to narrow my areas of research for my

capstone project. Initially, it is easy to think in terms of, “I want to find

the connection between physical activity and academic achievement.”

One element that I thought went along with that was the analysis of

results data at my own school. This is far too broad a topic with too

many possible factors contributing to changes in results, so it would be

very hard to draw a connection to the amount of physical activity

students are receiving. However, if I was able to see the averages for

entire years and compare it at a later date with this entire year's worth

of results, I think you could use that information to see if the new

schedule had a negative or positive impact on student achievement.

Amount of physical activity levels would simply be one possible factor in

either outcome.

45 minutes Focus on watching Ted Talk: “Want Smarter Kids? Try Physical Education! by Paul Zientarski:

videos related to Hey promotes a move away from traditional PE. He points to two

connection between problems facing the world today in schools (his focus in the united

academics and states). The first is that they are lagging behind the rest of the world in

physical activity. their results in core subject areas. The second is that kids today are

increasingly unhealthy, which is resulting in them likely to live shorter

lives than the generation prior. He points to the elimination of Physical

 Reading and Education as a main contributing factor to this phenomena. The solution

reflecting on article he posits is not only the approach to PE, but when that PE occurs. He

(Hernandez) proposes that we think about things differently- primarily by using

physical education as a vehicle for this different approach. He references

the need for implementation of policy, making PE mandatory, as a

critical piece to this change. The next piece is adapting the PE emphasis

away from sport based and into a focus on health and fitness. His

provides data from a project he pioneered called Learning Readiness

Physical Education (LRPE), where they would place students who were

having difficulty in school in a particular subject and place them in one of

their newly designed PE classes prior attending the class they’re having

difficulty in. They immediately saw improvement and this improvement

continued.

These findings are also present in the article by Hernandez, where she

cites studies that show a “direct relationship between school health and

physical education and a student's’ academic success within and outside

of school (p. 1). Hernandez emphasizes the influence teachers and

schools heave in promoting healthy living, including physical activity, in

order to achieve academic success and overall student health and

lifelong healthy behaviours(p. 3).

25 minutes Meeting at school Had a brief conversation with my supervisor for this internship regarding

with Michael Chute the results I have seen so far.

re: results and We also spoke about the feedback we received from teachers regarding

gathering more the schedule change. He said, “I could see the train coming” which was

information his reference to the fact that he has not been surprised by any of the
 feedback. Much of the talk is regarding how can we make changes to the

schedule moving forward so that students would have more academic

opportunities (i.e. taking courses that fit into their schedule) rather than

the schedule change being unsuccessful.

45 minutes reading article Brusseau and Hannon, Impacting Children’s Health and Academic

relating to topic Performance through Comprehensive School Physical Activity

Programming.

After reading the article by Hernandez and watching the Ted Talk by Paul

Zientarski earlier in the week, I wanted to try and find more evidence

pointing towards health and academic success being positively impacted

(or negatively) by physical activity programming in schools. I found an

article by Brusseau and Hannon that seemed to connect quite well.

Brusseau and Hannon echo many of the same facts I’ve been coming

across throughout my reading, namely the role schools can play in

promoting physical activity and it’s numerous benefits from both a

health and academic perspective. Of particular interest to me in this

article, is when the authors reference a study by Sallis and colleagues

(1999) in which they stated that “increases in school PA opportunities do

not diner academic performance; in fact they suggest the inverse may

be true (Brasseau & Hannon (2014), p. 441). Brasseau & Hannon also list

the health issues that occur when kids and youth are not physically

active, which are the same findings referenced in the Ted Talk by Paul

Zientarski. Also similar to the policy implementation referenced by

Zientarski, Brasseau & Hannon recommend that PE and PA standards be

guided through policy to encourage the two major outcomes of health

 and physical activity. They cite research by Darst et al. (2015) that

recommend children be active at least 50% of class time. This is time

outside of regularly scheduled PE. What i find interesting about the

finding from Brasseau & Hannon is that they take similar ideas

presented by Paul Zientarski and put it into the classroom, recess, and

throughout the rest of the school day. So, they not only agree with

Zientarski, but suggest it needs to go even further, stating this will cause

“better retention and retrieval of memory (Brasseau & Hannon (2014),

p. 445).

As I read this I couldn’t help but thing how daunting a task it would be to

try and encourage my staff to be on board with giving up significant

portions of their time in the classroom to giving student physical activity

time. However, if any school was going to do it, I think that my school

being a sports academy is a likely candidate for success due to the fact

that so many of our staff are sporty people, who also teach PE. Any

rollout would not only require lots of research to support this change in

approach in a classroom, but I think it would have to be done slowly on

an individual voluntary basis. These teachers would then have to

become advocates to the rest of the staff and data would need to be

collected to show improvements in their classrooms since providing

more PA time.

30 minutes Analyzing a study on After reading reviews and watching videos relating to physical activity

“Fueling Learning and academic achievement, I wanted to find an example of an actual

through Exercise” aka study on the topic, rather than an article that cites studies. Since my

“FLEX” program. internship involves me gathering data of my own (from my school) I

thought this would be a valuable opportunity to see how a professional

 study works. For this I found one by Wright et al. in BMC Public Health

titled, “Study protocol: the Fueling Leaning through Exercise (FLEX)

study- a randomized controlled trial of the impact of school-based

physical activity programs on children’s physical activity, cognitive

function, and academic achievement.” This study was interesting

because it looked at the impact of two school based PA programs. This

was of value to me because as more and more research points to a

positive correlation between physical activity and academic

achievement, the important next step is to find physical activity

programs that are proven to be effective in implementing PA into the

classroom to help promote higher achievement.

150 Time organizing data I continued to work on rendering achievement information into simple

minutes from files (data cohort averages from each of the previous 5 years- term 1. I am close to

analysis from excel having it all into meaningful information and hope to be able to discuss

files) it with my vice principal soon.

60 minutes Meeting with Bryan Radmanovich and I went for coffee together. During this time we

Principal discussed some of the challenges of implementing change. We also

discussed ways of promoting the different physical education programs

and the instruction that kids receive (high quality instructors). I also

talked to him about how to deal with teachers that are resistant to

change. He has great rapport with the staff and is a very positive person,

so has an extremely valuable perspective- especially given his level of

experience.
160 data analysis and time Today I managed to finish breaking down the data that was provided

minutes spent searching for from my vice principal in order to organize it by subject, year, term, and

and reading related cohort. My next step will be to take the basic information and present it

articles to Michael Chute (vice principal) and see if he has recommendations or

suggestions as to how it should be organized. I also want to briefly

discuss some of the findings.

After finishing the data I continued my search for articles. A majority of

my research has been focused on the connection between physical

activity and academic achievement. Now that I have some actual data,

I’ve started to gear the research more towards the role of schools,

administration, and policy. This will help me to start connecting this

internship to leadership and also provide more research based

information that I could then take to the vice principal regarding

scheduling information.

60 minutes Leadership article I spent an hour today going through the city university databases trying

search different word searches and browsing articles that relate to my topic

(implementation of and changes in my internship based on research and practical use of the

physical activity data I am collecting.

programs)

15 minutes Youtube video After having been introduced to Simon Sinek by a colleague and then

featuring Simon seeing him again in our class at city university, so I wanted to try and

Sinek, “why good pursue more of his presentations, hoping that they will be relevant to

leaders make you feel some of my leadership pursuits for this internship. In this particular

safe” video he talks about the power of an environment that can create trust
 and how great leaders can create this environment where people feel

safe through trust. He is talking about the business world but I can’t help

but see the commonalities in the teaching world. The strength of the

organization depends on its members feeling safe in their environment

and safe from their leadership team.

Video link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmyZMtPVodo

30 minutes Brief meeting with VP I had an informal meeting with the vice principal today. I showed him a

regarding results of basic breakdown of the data I had acquired. One of the questions I had

data collection. related to some grade 9 marks that seemed unusual. There were a

couple predictions as to why these numbers would have been off. He

was able to confirm that it was due to the semestering of grade 9 at our

school. Some years the “honours” classes are in the first term,

sometimes they are in both terms, and sometimes they are in the

second term. This is good to know because it means that I didn’t make

mistakes with my numbers, however, it also takes away from the validity

and value of this whole data collection process. We discussed how this

shows that we really need to be collecting the data from each semester,

term, and year, not just the first term of each year as I have been doing.

This makes sense but really undermines the value of my data collection.

The numbers collected are not useless, especially at the grade 7 and 8

level, but I am finding that to make this information useful, it will take

far more data collection and far more time than I have available. I may

need to shift my focus from the data to article research collection and

policy implementation. Also, I can follow up with a previously viewed

 Ted Talk, where researchers looked at the correlation of when physical

activity occurs and see if that information could be useful to pass along

to administration during their schedule building process.

150 Conducting After the realization that my data may end up not being as helpful as I

minutes observation in my had perhaps naively believed it would be from the outset, I have turned

own classroom and my intention towards implementation of physical activity and timing of

reflecting on its physical activity relating to academic achievement. Today my class

connection to what schedule had me with my grade 7 hockey group at the school for a 60

I’ve been reading. minute period in the fitness centre followed by approximately 60

minutes in the classroom working on character education. My

observation of the day was that, after working hard through an active

fitness class, the students did a surprisingly good job of settling down for

class in period 3 and did a good job on their character assignment. They

were able to work quietly through the assignment that was relating to

recognizing characteristics of a role model. The activity had them

working quietly on their own, collaboratively in partners, and also

walking around the room interviewing classmates. Earlier in the year we

had the same scheduled day, except the classroom time was first and

fitness was second. On that day is was extremely challenging to get the

students organized, settled, and keep them on task for the 60 minutes

class period. Today was much better and ultimately very successful from

a productivity perspective. There is nothing scientific about these finding

and that was not my intention. I just wanted to use observations in my

own classroom as an opportunity to think about what I saw and how it

 compares to what I’ve been reading about the connection between

physical activity and academic achievement. My professional judgement

is that my class benefited from having a fitness class prior to a work

class, because it seemed to allow them to focus better in the classroom

portion of the two block day.

60 minutes research I found a really interesting article today. It not only dealt with the

connection of physical activity and academic achievement, more

Berg et al. (2017)
importantly for me, it identified perceptions of teachers and principals

regarding the implementation of more physical activity in a school day

and programs that are actually “feasible” in a school environment (Berg

et al, (2017), p. 1). The study is from the Netherlands, so I think the

results are relevant in a Canadian context. It emphasized the importance

of teachers seeing value in the time spent doing physical activity,

because they are already feeling like there is not enough time in the day

to get through their required curriculum. I”m sure this would be a

common theme among Canadian teachers. The article also identifies the

importance of resources being easily accessible and easy to follow. The

example they provide is a video clip that takes the students through

some physical activity that is meant to re-energize them for the next

part of the lesson (Berg et al., (2017), p. 7). The results in this article,

which primarily relied on interviews with principals and teachers, gave

evidence of conversations that seemed eerily similar to the comments I

hear at my own school. This made it so this article really connected with

me and helps to understand from an academic perspective some of the

observations I’ve become akin to in my own educational context.

175 Graphing data Now that I have collected all of the necessary data, I need to put it

minutes collected from school. together in a way that will be easy to read and a visual representation of

trends. Today I made good progress in this regard.

60 minutes Continue to graph The data has been collected and I am now putting it into graph form so

and chart data. that it will be more of a visual representation of the results achieved by

Vimy Ridge Academy students. I decided to present the data in cohort

groups, rather than by year, but will also include the spreadsheet data

showing both pieces of information in my portfolio.

15 minutes Brief meeting with I checked in briefly with my assistant principal to let him know where I

assistant principal was at with the data. He informed me about the proposed timetable he

is going to put forward to staff on Thursday that has taken into account

all of the feedback that was collected on Nov. 2, 2017. He has managed

to address all of the common concerns while not lengthening the school

day. He has also added a “flex period” to Thursday’s. I see this

potentially growing into an additional opportunity to get kids active. It

will depend on where the research goes and how they choose to utilize

that time.

45 minutes Youtube video This video has the same theme to an earlier video I watched by Simon

featuring Simon Sinek. It is a more in-depth explanation of how trust is created and when

Sinek, “why leaders that trust is created, a group will turn to a leader when they feel danger.

eat last” He posits that this is a fundamental difference between someone who is

a person of authority and someone who is a leader. One of the pieces

that I took away from this was his pleading for proper use of email. He

says it is a great way to transfer information such as meeting times and

business reports. However, it should be avoided when you need to tell

someone what you think of a job they recently completed or are giving

feedback regarding a question about performance a colleague might

have asked. He says these conversations need to be had in person and a

good leader will not only take the time to have these conversations, but

will therefore create an environment of trust and appreciation. This

reminded me of transformational leadership, which I have been reading

about for my ECC 509 assignments. A good leader empowers people to

attain a level of performance that they didn’t think was possible (Bass,

1981, p. 31).