The past month turned out to be a lot more hectic than I had planned on. There were truthfully quite a few times when I sat down to write but I just kept finding it too difficult to focus in the middle of a myriad of family events and a number of ongoing changes happening within my school... not to mention the demands of the final push to see out the school year. Time to reconnect with that sweet, sweet blogging therapy.
Making Sense of High-School Redesign
One of the many changes currently being worked on for the upcoming school year is on how CHHS, a grade 7 to 12 school, can successfully incorporate the principles of High School Redesign (HSR). However, there has been a feeling amongst some of our middle school department, including myself, that we perhaps haven't been fully included in some of those discussions. This isn't, however, intended to be a critique of school leadership. It has mainly been a request and plea to see that we are doing our part, along with our colleagues in high school, to build the learning community being sought.
I recently had the opportunity to visit with my new incoming principal and he asked me what I felt about High School Redesign. When I relayed the sentiment above to him I also expressed my own desire to develop a more thorough knowledge and experience with the guiding principles of this journey. It was then that I realized just how perfect this space would be for me to address HSR and how it will change how my colleagues and I teach and work with our students.
High School Redesign is based on the following principles:
My hope is to address each of these principles over the coming weeks and months and share a little bit about how I am using them in my own classroom. It's mainly intended for myself but it's always awesome when I'm able to share something cool with someone else.
I'll talk first about Mastery Learning later this week.
You Spin Me Right Round, Baby...
After Dabbing, the endless flipping of water bottles, and bags of slime, yet another trend/fad has found its way into our school: fidget spinners.
Maybe I'm old-school / traditional but I wasn't initially convinced when some students excitedly told me just how much these things helped them to focus. Of course it didn't really help their cause when I saw growing numbers of students staring deeply into the metallic vortex at their fingertips. It didn't take long before I came up with what I thought was a reasonable compromise. After explaining my concerns, I said simply that all I was asking for was that I would neither see nor hear any fidget spinner. This wasn't an outright ban but a chance for kids to evaluate how they were using them. For what it's worth, it seems to have worked. At least until whatever the next groundbreaking trend will be.
Graduation and Viking Cheer
It took five years, but I was finally able to attend our high school graduation ceremonies this past week. One particular highlight of the evening came as our outgoing principal explained that we would be starting a new tradition. To be fair, we may have had some inspiration but I thought we pulled it off pretty nicely.
More to come...
~MrT
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