SLA

Sustainability

The trick to starting a new progressive school — especially one that is trying to question many of the underlying assumptions about schools and schooling — is knowing when to say, "I can do no more today." Our teachers are writing new curriculum, creating new assessments, learning every day about teaching, about technology infusion (new literacy for you, David… and it really is), It can be really difficult, especially once you fold in the technology piece. Several of our teachers answer emails and messages until they go to bed, and that — along with everything else — can create a pretty exhausting existence.

And for me, it’s equally exhausting. I may not be taking papers home to grade anymore, but by last week, I was answers a few dozen emails a day and my inbox was still creeping over 300, and that was as good a metaphor as any. We’re interviewing another 400 applicants for next year’s class this weekend, and once that’s done, I’m pretty sure we’ll all need Christmas Break pretty badly.

It raises the question of sustainability. Now, I’ve been around enough new schools to know that this gets easier for everyone involved. Next year, we’ll have policies, we’ll have curriculum, we’ll have the beginnings of a history. And in the meantime, one thing the adults are trying to do is look out for one another to make sure that we’re still taking care of each other. Building a school based on the ethic of care has to include the adults or you won’t take care of the children.

So I’ve been trying to kick some teachers out of the building from time to time, especially when I know we’ve got some huge events on the horizon. And I’m trying to take care of myself today too. I was offline until tonight. Jakob and I went to the diner this morning, and Kat and I took the boys to buy a Christmas tree (and yes, the menorahs are out as well), and then I spent the rest of the day reclaiming my office from the mess that it had become in the past month. And I did it without apology and without considering the emails I could have been returning. Now, hours later, my office is clean, my laundry is done, my mail is sorted, and I feel more in control of my life.

It’s too easy for all of us in education to lose ourselves in our job. Starting a new school — one where all the adults have had a say in the vision, in the planning, in the implementation — can become overwhelming. Remembering to step back is important, because this is a marathon, not a sprint. I want to be the principal of SLA for a long time. I want these founding teachers to be around for a long time. That means we all have to take care of each other and ourselves.

Blogging at SLA starts to take off….

We’re starting to move with our blogs — and with Elgg — now… Our English teacher, Alexa Dunn has been doing an Odyssey blog project, and our Tech Coordinator Marcie Hull is teaching all the students to keep digital portfolios of their work. (And I’m realizing that I’m going to have to buy a much bigger server to hold all this stuff… we’re going to have terrabytes of files very soon.)

It’s exciting to see what’s happening, as now that we’ve gotten our feet wet, more and more teachers are looking to help the kids get their work online. We’ve got some Spanish 1 videos about to appear, we’re got a spoken word project, and once we get ProfCast on all the computers, the kids will be able to publish their PowerPoint presentations as m4p files with their voice explaining the project.

We’re going to do a school-wide reflection blog experiment through Advisory right before the Winter Break, and that should be a really interesting experience as we ask the kids to all look back on their first few months of SLA. I’m curious — what questions would you want a group of tech-savvy, first-class-ever ninth graders to answer as they take a look back on the whole of their initial experience? What questions would you want the teachers to answer?

Milestones: Parent-Advisor Conferences

Tonight was the first night of our first Parent-Advisor conferences. I always have loved parent-advisor conferences because it’s a chance to see my advisees in a larger context. It’s a chance to really sit down with a student and a parent and look at the whole picture of who that student is in the context of school.

The way conferences work at SLA (and yes, we did it this way at Beacon) is that all the teachers write narrative reports on every student at the end of the first and third marking periods, which is right before parent-advisor conferences. (We write them on a database program. Currently it’s not web-enabled, but we’re working on that.) We print those and sort those by advisor. Then, every advisor schedules conference time with the families in their advisory. The parents and students come in and meet with the advisor who goes over all the narrative reports. And because we have a four-year advisory program, that advisor and that family get to have these meetings over time, which means that every student knows there’s always an adult in the building who has a real sense of the whole picture of of who they are as a student.

It was interesting to give the kids their reports in advisory today before conferences. For most of the students, it was the first time they’d seen narrative reports. It was interesting to see them react to how a report card can be so much more than a letter or a number. A few mentioned how, even if they didn’t do as well as they’d like, the narrative made them feel better, because the teachers wrote about their strengthens and weaknesses and gave them concrete ideas for improvement. I think it changes the way they look at teachers when they see that kind of thoughtful reflection about student progress too. And for parents, it’s a powerful moment to get that much feedback. One parent said, "This is so much to take in!" But in every case, it’s the invitation into conversation, into improvement, into deep analysis and reflection of how and why we perform the way we do in school.

Practical Theory

SLA

Sustainability

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Blogging at SLA starts to take off….

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Milestones: Parent-Advisor Conferences

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Chapter 4: Build Modern Schools - Re:Building School 2.0

Practical Theory

SLA

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Chapter 4: Build Modern Schools - Re:Building School 2.0