Today is the "Staff Only" day for the end of our second year at SLA. There’s a few dozen reflective posts for me to write about this year, but to start, I wanted to share my answers to the questions we all answered.

• What are three things I’m proud of in my own teaching?

1. I was pleased that I was able to map out a PD / Workshop plan for several month stretches. I feel like when I was able to get a sense of the whole of what we wanted to do with our workshops, there was a much more powerful sense of purpose to the meetings.
2. I’m pleased with the way I managed the changes above us. This could have been a more difficult year, given the changes at SDP and TFI, and I think I did a pretty good job of keeping the craziness around us away from the school.
3. I think I did a pretty good job of knowing when to step back and let folks go and when to step in and shift course. That’s the hardest one to know what that looks like from where I sit, but I think I gave folks chances to really run things or really take things in directions I didn’t see. I liked how many times this year I had to tell kids, "Go see [teacher] about that, because I don’t know.

• What are three goals for my teaching next year?
1. As we grow, I want to keep working to see every kid and every teacher every day. I think that next year, I’m going to have to block out two periods a day where my "schedule" is to be walking around the building, seeing what is going on. I see that as something that keeps me very connected in the building, and I don’t want to lose that. I already felt this year that there were days I didn’t get into classrooms, and already, without planning when those times happened, it seemed there were people I saw teach more than others.
2. I think I need to have more times where we have a sense of where our PD is going. The more I can plan, the more I can give away big pieces of the planning to others, bring in outside folks (for example, we never did schedule David Jakes to do his digital storytelling workshop — that’s a loss.), and the more other people can own pieces of the puzzle. That requires me to be more organized and more forward thinking. That’s a struggle.
3. A goal for me next year is to find the time to do a more formal style of observations / feedback. I do like the pre-meeting, meeting, post-meeting forward, but one of my private goals for this year was to be able to give every teacher a letter this week that was about what I saw from them / in them this year as an educator, and I just didn’t get to that.
• What are three school-wide pride moments?
1. We doubled this year and kept — and grew — our culture. Year Two is one of the hardest years in new school development because it’s the only year you double in size. I think we should be really proud of how we brought in a whole new group of kids and got them on-board with what it means to be at SLA. That’s not easy.
2. I’m, honestly, in awe of the sheer amount and high quality of the work of everyone involved in SLA. The kids did a TON of really good work, and that only happened because of the care and dedication of the adults. A related pride moment is that we had, literally, hundreds, if not over a thousand, visitors this year, and we remained a transparent school. People could walk into any classroom on any day and see active, engaged learning. The feedback we got from all our visitors is important for us, because it reminds us of the bar we set for ourselves.
3. I’m really proud of the fact that two years in, we are becoming a true R&D facility, not just for the district, but for a much larger community. Whether it was EduCon, School of the Future, FLC, Lead in Philly, Penn PhD folks, etc…. we had so many people who come here to learn from and with us. We forget — we’re two years into this experiment. We should be really proud that people think we are worthy of study.
• Three school-wide goals:
1. Integrating nine (eep!) new teachers into our culture next year — and I think one of those challenges is going to be to start to figure out how to "differentiate (BINGO!) instruction" in our own workshops. How do we teach teachers who have never used UbD to use it while allowing those who have been doing it for one or two years to continue to get better? (for example.)
2. Anticipating senior year. I think we have to really look forward this coming year so that we don’t run into the "Oh, God, we’ve got seniors!" moment. (I’ve seen that in other places.) This means being able to give kids a roadmap for Capstone, this means ramping up college now.
3. Setting up more time and structure for stream teachers to find ways to make more deliberate interdisciplinary connections. This is something that, if we want it to happen, we have to find a way to make time for it in PD workshops. As our schedule gets more complex, that will get harder and harder, but it’s still really important.
4. Keeping a sense of humility before the enormity of the task in front of us.

Reflecting on the reflection — so we all answered these questions in a Moodle journal and then spent the next hour reading each other’s work and then talking about the work. I’m not going to post other people’s private writing here, but I will say that it’s amazing to read the work of a group of dedicated educators all pulling in the same direction who have walked a walk together to build a school.

Tags: SLA, reflection, school_reform