A few years ago I joined other educators and leaders in declaring a guiding word (#oneword) for the new year.  I didn't choose a word last year but had I done it, it would have been "blessings".  The past few days while cleaning and running, I've put some thought into what my #oneword would be for 2021 and I have landed on the following two words, embrace and serve.

Building and maintaining school culture is something I'm passion about and within my instructional coaching role I feel a personal responsibility to be a part of this work.  I am fortunate that our other building instructional leaders also sees this as a priority.  I get a lot of great ideas for this on Twitter and the Principal Principles Facebook Group. Door Hanger Snack Delivery Snacks/Food- One of the ways that we promote community and positive culture is sharing one another's company over snacks and food.  That might look like a snack cart delivery during the first week back to school, a caramel apple bar for a morning PD snack, a staff pot luck on a PD day, ice cream floats for an afternoon snack after PD, smoothie/yogurt bar the morning of conferences, occasional Bagel Fairy drop ins (in the morning), chocolate at team meetings, or snacks brought to week long professional development sessions in Chicago. Rockstar Awards I Have Received Rockstar Awards-  Th

One of the things that really interests me within my instructional leadership role is putting together protocols for meetings, professional development, and problem solving to make the most out of our time we spend together as professionals.   I have picked some of these up from my professional learning community on Twitter, at conferences, by reading books and blogs and have adapted them to fit the context of the meeting or session.  I am going to do my best to share each of them here.  I had intended to facilitate a session at #USMSpark 2020, but since the conference was cancelled I wanted to make sure that my professional learning community has access to these great protocols that I have seen a lot of success with!  Please don't hesitate to reach out with any questions that you may have about any of these. (7 minute)  Problem Solving Protocol  Click Here to Access Problem Solving Protocol This is a protocol that I implemented with our school leadership team around some

Each year (like many of you) we take the time to review data as a building leadership team, as a building staff, and within grade level and content area teams.   This has been often facilitated by presenting the data on slides or in PDFs with staff reflecting on sheets of paper in small groups.  This year we wanted to attempt to mix it up and increase the interactiveness, reflection and engagement around the data.  The instructional strategy that we decided to utilize was a write around .   This ensured that each staff member would have an opportunity to independently reflect and comment on the data and would provide an opportunity for all voices to be heard. You may have specific data that your team is interested in looking at.  We chose to use the following data and arranged it in the following (7) stations: MAP Growth for Math & Reading Achievement for Math & Reading Special Education Gaps Panorama (Student & Families) Attendance Data, Discipline Data, PBIS

Every once in a while in our building we offer choice sessions as rewards for students.  One of my favorites that I like to facilitate is a team trivia session to tap into student knowledge as well as to support team building.  This trivia was inspired by how America's Pub Quiz Trivia is facilitated at local restaurants in the area. I created an abbreviated version to support sessions from 30 to 45 minutes. Team trivia is facilitated in the same way that pub trivia is facilitated in which teams choose how many points each question is worth.  In the first round the points you can choose per question are 5, 3, or 1.  In the second round the points jump up to 6, 4, or 2 points.  Teams can only earn points on these questions each round, they cannot lose points by guessing.  Each point total can only be used ONCE per round.  I am fairly flexible on how much time I allow students to answer the questions, but I would recommend being consistent and using a timer for each question and pr

This summer I was one of 24 attendees fortunate enough to have the opportunity to participate in the Click Teacher Summer Camp : A Video Production Immersion Experience hosted by Wisconsin Public Television and PBS Student Reporting Labs.  This PD opportunity is one that has been traditionally available in Washington D.C. but they brought it locally to Madison.  It was held on the UW-Madison campus and we spent most of our time between the WPT studios and UW-Madison campus buildings for the three days that we were there. DAY 1 My Awesome Team You know a good PD session when you see it, and this one knocked it out of the park by first beginning with relationships!  We all had an opportunity to introduce who we were, where we are from, and where we use video production in our roles.  From there we were given an image.  It turns out that image matched us with our production partner.  Cameras matched with lenses and lights matched with light stands.  From there we were required to