Oscar Nava, assistant principal at Spring Valley Academy in San Diego County, and his team participated in LAEP’s 21CSLA Leadership Collective last school year. Here is what Oscar had to say about his experience.
It’s hard to put words on the experience that we went through this past year.
One thing that I’ve been thinking about after experiencing 21CSLA – including the one-on-one coaching and small team coaching – has been the idea that it’s important to be disrupting and having individual conversations that are not easy to have.
My personal growth this past year has been in having conversations with caring adults that sometimes speak in draft form. It’s something that I’ve come to realize, and I think it’s okay, that sometimes we’re not speaking in final draft. But I think it’s incredibly important to listen and understand each other. Because ultimately, what we want is for our students to feel valued and have a place of belonging, and for students to feel like their school is a place of meaning.
Our small team has been in conversations with beginning empathy interviews and refining our empathy interviews. In fact, we’ve conducted them already, however, we kept them in our small team. We want to build on that, and really just highlight what’s going well at our campus. There are a lot of times schools and adults on campuses are always constantly looking for the solution. But really, we should be building on the things that are going well on our campus. And that’s what we want to highlight through the voices of our students. That’s exactly what we want to implement, show that to our staff, show it to our paraprofessionals, show it to our parents – because there are some great things happening at schools. And we want to highlight the things that are happening at our school.
21CSLA gave us the opportunity to have conversations with like-minded, similar schools throughout the county that are experiencing very similar patterns and themes on our campuses, really coming together as a community to discuss best practices for kids. It’s extremely important to have those conversations with our community. A lot of times we feel like we’re the only ones going through certain things on campuses, but really it’s county-wide, even nation-wide.
LAEP’s 21CSLA Leadership Collective is a one-year program that provides school leadership teams in Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Imperial Counties with one-on-one and team coaching, professional learning workshops, and communities of practice. We also offer separate topical professional learning to educational leaders in these counties throughout the school year – all at no cost thanks to the statewide 21CSLA initiative.