Introduction

Building organizational capacity is an ongoing process. Teacher hiring and supervison and evaluation are important functions of the Master Principal. The quality of your faculty and staff determines the quality of what can be accomplished at your school. Developing a culture that promotes staff development and training initiatves fosters continuous improvement of all staff. The ideal is to create a community of learners that do not have all the answers but seek ways to improve practice. Life long learning and continuous growth is my goal for the West High staff. My work over the past three years has focused on implementing a $500,000 federal Grant to Restructure into Smaller Learning Communities. This has required building leadership capacity in teachers as planners, facilitators and department chairs. Smaller Learning Communities Model. West recieved a 500,000.00 grant from the US Department of Education. Teacher collaboration, curriculum mapping, understanding by design assessment practice, Race, Equity and Diversity, closing the achievement gap have all been key themes in our staff development plan. In addition we have focused on systems that needed to be addressed in various departments and units of our staff. There were serval retreat days around counseling practice and philosophy, Clerical service models, teacher teaming and collaboration. The following artifacts give some idea about the primary goals and objectives as they relate to staff development and continuous improvement.