"Our vision is to create inquisitive and passionate problem solvers by teaching the whole child to become positive contributors to our community."
For January's installment of the Be Thou My Vision series, I've decided to NOT reflect about something happening in my classroom. We have a lot going on in the month of January; parent presentations about John Phillip Sousa, exploring new learning with developing improvisation skills, developing our absolute pitch name understanding, reviewing how notes on a staff let us know what a song sounds like, etc...
What's on my mind about my school's vision statement this month is related to a committee that I oversee: the PBIS committee. We've done a major overhaul on the way we think about discipline and classroom management on our campus, and we still experience growing pains from time to time. Through growing together and developing our campus approach to PBIS, I found myself wanting to fill in the need for a teacher leader to lead this committee. Someone who understands what it's like to teach in a classroom where we are being asked to implement a new classroom behavior management strategy while also delivering curriculum that feels a mile wide and an inch deep.
If you're not catching that this was a painful transition (and still is for a handful of folks), then you're simply not reading well between the lines here, people. ;)
One thing that I've done this month is taken all of the data we collected on behaviors in the Fall 2016 semester and analyzed it. This was all in preparation of presenting an "At-A-Glance" report to the committee and to my administrators in February. I would lying if I said that sitting and running behavior data was worthless to me; I was so incredibly fired up and fueled by the data that I was manipulating and I was very proud of how far our teachers have come in our approach to teaching behavior.
Running the data around and creating tables and charts to share with my committee members and administrators was definitely a big part of the "positive contributors to our community" phrase from our vision statement. It puts wind in my sails to see how we can better shape our tiny humans into awesome community members.