My School Goals Journal -- Take Two

1) What would you see as our highest priority school-wide goals this year? What do you see as both the necessary steps and possible road-blocks for us this year?

2) What are your personal goals for your teaching this year? How do you see yourself achieving them? What supports do you think are necessary to help you achieve them?

1) School-wide goals -->

a) Continued work on creating a language of teaching and learning with UbD as its core so that there is a common vocabulary that is meaningful to all members -- teachers and students. This involves a year long investigation into UbD -- as it translates to our community. This should be a frequent focus of faculty workshops. What keeps us from there? Crisis mode... getting reactive... also just the sheer (continued) enormity of our task... long term road-block -- if we are successful this year -- and as we build a greater and more complex version of the curriculum design at SLA -- how do we bring new teachers into that process in authentic ways?

b) Continue to deeply investigate what this notion of 21st Century teaching and learning means. We should look at the idea that learning is networked, and that our networks are now global. Last year, our focus was on our immediate human network, and I think we laid amazing groundwork for the 24/7 school with the work we did with Moodle. This year, I hope to see more student publishing, more chances for students to have their work critiqued by those outside our walls, more opportunities for all of us to learn from the ideas of those outside our immediate community. What gets in the way? We still don't have the "perfect" tool for it... The tools are overwhelming and changing... The training takes time... and even in the best case scenario, right now, we'll all need ten logins to fifteen sites to do forty-five things. Yee gods... I don't want our learning to be a mile-wide and an inch deep.

c) Humanistic education -- The buzz word is "educating the whole child," and I think we did an amazing job of this last year. This year, however, most faculty members will have their class roster jump from 90-100 students plus advisory to 120-125 students plus advisory. That's a big jump. We're going to have to work that much harder to keep seeing every student as a person in front of us. I think we also have to look at continuing to work hard at valuing multiple intelligences and making sure that the students we look to to lead aren't just the straight A kids... Again, I think that the collaborative aspect of the school culture did a lot to get us there. Now we need to ensure that we have some structures in place to continue that. Some of those are our takes on the traditional "help struggling kids" model, some are about the way we look at school culture so that kids learn to value their freedoms while understanding and acting in a way that shows personal responsibility. Road blocks -- size of class, SDP beaucratic mandates, falling in love with our curriculum at the expense of the student.

2) Personal goals -- figuring out how to manage myself to best facilitate the paths to do all this. Yikes.