Starting School Differently in 2018

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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 level chose a song that they wanted to welcome students back to school with and recorded it.  Of course, the office staff went first to push ourselves out of our creativity comfort zone!  The community loved the activity and the teachers, for the most part, enjoyed bonding with their teammates.

Checkout our Video Collection on our Facebook page or search our hashtags #CrusaderQuest, #FSPSTeacherChallenge.  It was super fun and I am stopped in the community all the time by fans who have seen the teachers singing their hearts out!  The teachers even decided to challenge other local schools to create videos and some did!!!







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