My First Superintendent's Meeting of the year - establishing a Culture of Action

Today when I met with my school administrators I wanted to come with a manageable way to begin to introduce the concept of Instructional Rounds. It is difficult in education not to feel that layers upon layers are always being added to the work that we do each day. I didn't want my administrators, and conversely their teachers, to just think about instructional rounds as the flavour du jour so I came up with a frame that I hope will guide our work as we move forward.

This morning I introduced our Mantra for the year; Culture of Action. Within the the frame of if/then statements, I wanted to let my folks know that we need to be prepared to look at our professional practice and take action on things we know we need to change. If we are to ask teachers to take action, then as instructional leaders we need to be prepared to model our willingness to take action too.

Within our Culture of Action, I proposed to my group that we frame our if/then statements into 30 day challenges. At each Superintendent's meeting we will report to each other the success of our action statements, discuss challenges that we faced in accomplishing our actions and then create a new action statement for the next 30 days. I have also asked my administrators to share their 30 day challenge statements with their staff.

Our goal as a group is to model setting our "30 Day Challenge" action statements with our teachers, to have our teachers engage in a similar process with each other and to encourage our teachers to share their action statements with their students. How powerful would the experiment be if students began to create their own 30 day action statements?

I have no idea how this is all going to turn out which is the exciting part of taking a risk, but I do know that the talk and the collaboration that this process will create can't help but assist us in growing. We can't continue to do what we have always done or teach the way we have always taught. We must find ways to embed technology in all that we do and we must make education more engaging and inviting.

This morning we threw it down and decided that it was time to take Action. Maybe this Tedtalk will inspire you too.

As an aside, we also talked this morning about what we were going to ask teachers to stop doing. If we don't want teachers to feel loaded down as we learn better ways to improve our practice, we have to abandon strategies we didn't find effective.