Veronica Holyoke

Oakcrest Elementary School
West Jordan, Utah
veronica.holyoke@jordandistrict.org

Best Practices

1) Assistant Principal’s Role as Instructional Leader: The following is one example of my role as an instructional leader. As you will read in my initial application one of my first initiatives was to help my head principal and instructional coach implement math RTI for grades 1-6. To do this my coach and I first presented to the teachers the process we’d be using for implementation, at our back to school professional development, during the summer of 2022. We created a master schedule for math RTI implementation, including an assessment calendar, math RTI student grouping calendar and PLC schedule. I created common formative assessments for grades 1-6 to use during math RTI implementation; however, I did not create all of these on my own. To create some of the grade level common formative assessments I partnered with other teachers in the district. We also tracked data.

2) School Improvement Strategies: The following are examples of how I, as assistant principal, help initiate, implement, and support school improvement strategies. As you will read in my initial application a large area of concern has been student behaviors. First, my coach and I worked to create and implement a school-wide behavior team, which contains members of our teaching staff. In the spring of 2022 this team created school-wide behavior plans, including school rules for all areas of the building, and a school-wide reward system. This new program was taught and implemented at the beginning of the 2022 school year and is still being used today. Because of this program, school behaviors have improved tremendously. Second, I’ve worked with three fifth grade classrooms to improve classroom culture through tracking negative student behaviors while implementing replacement behaviors. Through this program teachers were able to reduce negative behaviors in the classroom dramatically. Finally, this past February, I implemented a positive lunchroom behavior program for fifth and sixth grade, where again I identified negative student behaviors, tracked negative behaviors, taught replacement behaviors, and rewarded students who are practicing replacement behaviors. Negative lunchroom behaviors have been reduced to only a few minor incidents a week, versus multiple major incidents per day, per grade.