Tomorrow, we start our week of faculty workshops at SLA, and our day is full. In the morning, Wayne Ransom from The Franklin Institute is going to work with us as we examine inquiry. He started our workshop last year, and his thoughtful look at a word we throw around a lot but don’t always examine was a great way to get us thinking. We’ll close the morning with a recap of last week’s Summer Institute, and we’ll try to engender some interesting conversations in the afternoon.

We’ll start the afternoon with discussions around two of my favorite thought pieces — Karl Fisch’s Did You Know 2.0 and Sir Ken Robinson’s TEDTalk Are Schools Killing Creativity. On a very basic level, my hope is that Did You Know sparks the conversation about how our world is changing and Sir Ken speaks powerfully about why our schools need to change — and perhaps gives us an insight into how to change too.

Those two pieces are — I hope — a great launching point into looking at our personal and school-wide goals for hte year. My hope is that an hour and a half long writing session / discussion around that idea will a) frame the "why" for the week, but also help us clarify as a community where we see ourselves going and where we want to get to. If the session goes well, this could really help us continue to structure our faculty workshop time for the year.

The session starts with two journal questions:

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?

And here are the instructions for the session:

• Spend 15 minutes writing your answers to the two prompts.
• Form groups of three: Each person gets two minutes to make comments in the "I noticed, I wonder, What if…" format. (This is a format where all comments must start with one of those three statements.)
• One timekeeper, one writer.
• Each person gets a chance to talk.
• At the end, look at your lists… are the groupings, commonalities, etc… that could help us create some common goals?
• Group share-out with a note-taker — Final notes to be put on Staff Moodle forum.

My goal for the day is to spend much of it in the land of big ideas, to really think deeply about how we teach and SLA and why we teach that way… and then move to a more concrete opportunity to start to look at how we each individualize the goals and vision of SLA and what is needed — both on the school-wide and individual levels — to achieve that vision.

If the day goes well, it sets a tone for the rest of the week. My hope is that all the time we spend as a whole faculty together is vital, is enriching and meaningful. My goal is for us to look at our faculty workshops as a continuing unified time where our work together feels — and is — building to a larger whole. Tomorrow is important for that, I think.