Handout 1: How We Did It-Our Management Skills

I think the key to improving our program was the decision to learn more about each staff member's role and how we can help each other. The value of helping one another became very clear at our first goal-setting meeting. Each Head Start staff member at the meeting shared his or her personal professional goals.

The first topic discussed was transitions. Betsy, a teacher, was looking for ideas on how to have smoother, more effective, and creative transitions between daily activities. Tara, the mental health specialist, said she uses singing as a transition activity. Jose, the family service specialist, said that when he goes on home visits, he talks to parents about the importance of planning for the transition from Head Start, such as getting ready for elementary school.

We continued to brainstorm ideas for transitions from various perspectives. We began to see ourselves as managers and felt motivated to learn more about how to do our jobs better. We now have three of these staff support meetings a year.

The next topic for our goal-setting meeting was the four basic management skills. These are planning, organizing, influencing, and evaluating. We quickly discovered that all of us use these skills. For example, Maria, another one of our teachers, plans special greetings for the parents. Roberto, the bus driver, organizes the bus route and fixes the schedule when new families join the program. Susan, one of our parents, influences two other parents, Sonya and Tomar, by picking them up for parent meetings. They now come regularly. We all agreed that we evaluate solutions for new ways to improve our program when we meet with community agencies, policy groups, and our families.

As a group, we decided that we wanted to fully develop our planning, organizing, influencing, and evaluating skills. We discussed the importance of using these skills in as many ways as we could. One staff member volunteered to talk to others in our program to come up with a list of how we could use these management skills cooperatively.

Summary Question

• What management practices are described in this scenario?
  
  

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