Inside the Trenches of the Principal: Week 15

I had the immense pleasure of bringing seven of my staff members to the Ron Clark Academy this week. It was an absolute joy seeing the experience through their eyes. Over the past eight years I have been a part of welcoming tens of thousands of educators from around the world into the walls of RCA, but this time I had the opportunity to debrief with a group of teachers who were going to make changes in our school.

While there are still many discussions to come with this group, they have been charged with leading the “House Committee” moving forward, which will help plan the roll-out of houses moving into the spring. I was so excited to hear that before the trip even ended they were already brainstorming ideas for the roll out of the houses at Moore! My job as principal is to now keep that fire going and stay focused on the goals that we are setting forth.

This past week also brought a district learning walk team through the school. This team of central office administrators joined members of my leadership team as we walked through classrooms to collect data on two specific areas: 1) implementation of the Moore Four, and 2) levels of rigor. The team was extremely impressed with how many changes we have been able to implement in just a short amount of time this year. The presence of classroom and hallway greeters, students standing to respond to answers, and manners being used showed the walk through team that we are serious about having a positive culture across the school. Our levels of rigor were not as high as I would have liked, but we are going to be honing in on that during the second quarter. I even had a fellow principal show me how to make a walk through form using Google Forms that auto-populates data collection, which I’ll be using to provide feedback on levels of rigor in our teaching! I’m looking forward to rolling that out.

And finally, my assistant principal and I got to have a small celebration when we completed every one of our first round of observations three days early! It’s the small victories that you need to remember!