Love one another

It's been a tough week, but some lessons remain universal and everlasting.

Hard Work, Whispers, and Giggles

I lost a treasured colleague to cancer yesterday. Pat Fisher and I spent years as the odd women out at administrative team meetings - Directors who appeared briefly at the table and then disappeared when our business was done - Quietly whispering and giggling in the entryway on our way back to our offices. I know that no one will ever eclipse the love Pat had for our community and our schools. She spent every moment she could advocating for the rights of all of our students and their families. While the rest of us were exhausted and sleeping, she and her family did the hard work that goes into making our community and our world a better place.

In a society full of controversy and vitriol, Pat lived a life of hard work, relationship building, and love. She was a role model for our children and ourselves. I am thankful that her legacy will live on in the quiet whispers and giggles of the children of Storm Lake.

We Bloom When It's Time

My Christmas cactus bloomed over the weekend!

Blooming on the window sill next to one of my flying pigs, it reminds me that our students are all unique with their own trajectories of learning. May we provide the supports for our students individually to bloom when it's their time, and may we celebrate that learning without time constraint judgements.

A blooming Christmas cactus in March? Patience and tender loving care have paid off.

May Our Hearts Leap

I was at a meeting at the hospital with our school nurses when I started hearing chimes that were quietly playing a lullaby. As I was wondering if it was a chiming clock in the maternity ward, one of the nurses leaned over to me and said, "They play that song when a baby is born."

 I am serious when I say that my heart leapt. I may have gasped. For some reason the joy that came over me was the same joy I felt when my own children were born. It was like going back in time.

As people who work with students every day, it's important to remember the joy families feel when their babies are born - The changes in day to day life that each new baby brings, the sense of love, and the dreams for the future. Let us never forget that every student is special and that it is in their uniqueness that they can change the world. May we develop relationships with each of our students - relationships that cause our hearts to leap with joy each time they walk through our doors.

Shhhhhhhh

Our students are people first

I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking about how to make schools better - how to prepare our students for a world that is much different than what it was like when I was their age. It's no secret if you've met me or followed me that I think there are better ways to educate than the traditional ways that we still see in most of our schools.

I believe in emphasizing our students' strengths rather than harping on their weaknesses. I believe that technology offers us a window on the world and that it is a moral imperative that we provide resources for our students to access that world and interact with it. I believe that standardized tests do not reliably measure what is really important when it comes to student learning. I believe that the lines should blur between subjects and age groups and that the best way to learn anything is to provide context, personal reference points, and authenticity. I believe that students can solve real world problems and are intrinsically driven to work very hard to do so.

What I believe first and foremost, though - The thing that I think will make any school and any classroom successful, despite instructional strategies or focus is this: I believe that our students are all unique individuals with individual passions and strengths and learning styles and thought processes and lives. I believe that the only way to improve education is:

• to focus on our students as whole people
• to get to know them in and out of school
• to care about them and encourage them to be who they are
• to provide for their needs no matter what those needs might be, and
• to help them learn the most about what they care deeply about.

The teachers who cared about me in this way are the ones who motivated me to learn and to lead a life of service. They saw the good in me, and they loved me for that. They did not harp on my weaknesses and take away my self-confidence. They encouraged my strengths.

I am thankful for that.

This blogger gets it right:

https://teachfromtheheart.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/i-teach-kids-not-data-points/

Passion, Conversation, and Change

I had the privilege of attending Iowa EdCamp at BVU on Saturday.

If you've never heard of or attended an EdCamp, take a look at the link:

http://edcampiowa.org/

Passionate community members from around Iowa came together in five different venues across the state to talk about the educational issues that they as groups chose to focus on. There were no leaders, no "superior by virtue of one's title," and no thoughts not honored and contemplated. It was truly a place to think about and share about education and how we might make it better. I chose to spend the day contemplating poverty, teacher leadership, and innovation in classrooms.

At the end of the day, we viewed a film entitled Most Likely To Succeed that I'm sure was unnerving to some.

http://www.mltsfilm.org/

The film's premise is that education must change dramatically to keep up with an age where information is literally at the fingertips of anyone with an Internet connection, where jobs are becoming much less based on what you know and more dependent on:

• What you can learn
• What you can create
• How well you can problem-solve
• How well you work with others

Talk about thought-provoking!

As a boat-rocking, protesting, future-thinking visionary - Ha ha! I wish I wore that hat consistently - I drew great strength from spending a day with people who care so deeply about education that they are willing to give up their Saturday to both share their own questions and beliefs and also to listen to the questions and beliefs of people that might not echo their own.

I saw a picture on Facebook this weekend from a classroom door at Maple Grove Elementary in West Des Moines that I would like posted on every classroom door in our district:

Since I had also just attended Iowa EdCamp, though, I also thought it applied to how welcome I hope everyone felt on Saturday. A huge shout out to our own SLCSD Mikaela Fiedler, Abbey Green, Deb Mortensen, and Carl Turner who also chose to participate in this collaborative day. I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did. Together we can make a difference.