Tomorrow--the big day.

Tomorrow the teachers come. It occurs to me that documenting some of this work could be important in the future. Clearing my head by writing every once in a while might also be important.

Assistant Principal.

Tomorrow, the show is really on. The last couple of weeks have been spent prepping, preparing and tomorrow, the teachers officially arrive--ready to begin another school year.

I'm realizing how important the balance between honoring history and leading change with focus and purpose.

One of the things I have been working on is the schedule. I've been spending about 85% of my time on that. And I'm glad I have. I remember how frustrating it was to get my schedule, hoping that it will be possible to fit academics around all of the other programmatic elements that go into the school day. One veteran teacher, Paula, asked to sit down with me about a week ago to discuss some concerns with her schedule. I invited her into my messy office (I hadn't even unpacked yet!) to sit down and talk. She expressed her concerns--all valid. I showed her the flexibility in the schedule that was possible and, together, we came up with some changes that she was able to make after looking at how all of the pieces came together. In the end, I did my job of ensuring that the constraints of the schedule were adhered to, and she did her job of ensuring that kids had what they needed to do their best work. I'm so grateful to her for coming in--because that meeting convinced me that I should be doing the same with ALL teachers. And so, I have. I've met with teachers one on one as they've been in the building and sent each one out of the office feeling like they have control over their classrooms, and they have the best schedule possible for their students. This process, while extremely time consuming, will be the foundation for the finalization of my scheduling practice in the future. This might seem, to non-educators, to be a simple solution. But, those who have taught know that this doesn't happen often. The schedule is often set from a management perspective--just to ensure that everything fits. But we should be going a step further if we want to students to be successful--it must fit. It also must work for kids.

Tomorrow--we have the first meeting with the full faculty. Here's the plan.

Tim, our principal will open with a few words.

Then, I will lead an activity where I'll put a long timeline labeled with years out in the hallway. I'll ask teachers to take a post-it and write down their name, when they joined the staff, and something about their connection to the school when they came. I will also invite staff to write down significant events in the history of the school on the post-its. Then, all staff will head out to the hallway where they will put their post-it on the appropriate place on the timeline. The staff will then do a "gallery walk" and take a look at what has been posted. My hope is that this will quickly but effectively acknowledge the history of the school, and the experience of long-time staff members. We'll see if it works.

We'll also begin a goal-setting activity that will continue the next day.

I'm exhausted so that's all I'm writing for now. I was at school from about 7:30AM until about 8:30PM tonight getting things ready.

If someone is actually reading this post--please forgive typos and bad sentence structure. I'm not proofreading--well not tonight anyway.