Leading, Learning, and Doing: A Principal's Story

In our effort to transition our campus into a Professional Learning Community, it was important to spend part of our beginning of the year PD developing our Shared Core Beliefs.  After being on campus for a year, it was very evident that there were meaningful shared core values on the campus that impacted student learning daily.  We did an "All on the Wall Activity" that allowed all teachers to add their unique beliefs on a sticky note, and then we collaborated to organize the stickies into categories.  We ended up with three powerful statements that absolutely defined what I saw on campus.  This is what we started with: We Believe- In Building Positive Relationships In Providing a Safe, Structured, and Engaging Learning Environment That Actions Speak Louder than Words After spending about two hours on the developing the three shared beliefs above, it was evident to me that we were missing one.  However it was not apparent to the staff.  This was a...

One of the challenges that was given to me going into my 4th year as a principal, was to start the year differently.  In the past, I have felt the need to stack as many professional learning opportunities as possible into a couple of campus development days before the start of school.  This year however, I decided to concentrate on my school climate.  We always begin the year teacher challenges, named Crusader Quests after our Crusader mascot.  This year, we took it a step further. My staff read The Wild Card, by Hope and Wade King, for our 2018 summer book study.  The teachers absolutely LOVED it and I was inspired by their enthusiasm.  I will have another blog post about the Wild Card book study that we did.  The book challenges teachers to get out of their creativity comfort zone.  In order to cement our book study, and begin the year differently, we began the year with a Carpool Karaoke challenge to share on social media.  Each grade le...

Although I am going on my fourth year as an elementary principal, it is only the second year on my current campus.  I spent 15 years in Texas as a teacher, assistant principal, and principal, and am now beginning my second year in Arkansas.  It has been an wonderful experience to see the similarities and differences in education between two different states.  Although I am still a newbie to Arkansas, I am loving it more each day.  This blog will be a reflection of the process that I used to transform my campus into a Professional Learning Community.  It will take lots of work, but in the end, it is what is best for kids.  There will be some updated done in the blog to reflect that work that was done from August through November in 2018.  I was not quite ready to blog until now....