This summer, I was doing some brainstorming with my colleagues Dan McDowell, Reuben Hoffman, and John Berray about how we can help to lead cultural change at our school. I absolutely believe that leadership and vision can come from any level of an organization. Too many people waste time lamenting the lack of vision and progress on their campus instead of getting off their butt and moving forward. Like I wrote in my Rolling Snowballs Downhill post, you don’t have to have buy-in from your whole staff; you just have to start moving forward with a small, committed group and then build momentum as you go.
We wanted a way to begin to build community, celebrate successes, recognize our peers, and maintain some of the rich history of our school. We built a weekly blog called West Hills Stories that is entirely run, directed, and maintained by teachers. We have English teachers edit the posts, Dan McDowell handles the tech side, and we all recruit contributors. My post, The West Hills Tapestry, was published there last week. I’d love for you to read my thoughts on schools being much more than the physical buildings and then maybe take a look at the rest of the blog.
Another example comes from the South Bay Unified School District. My wife, Shelley Burgess, started a daily blog called The SBUSD Year of Learning Project. It is a place where South Bay educators, parents, students, and community members contribute stories of their learning. It is an ambitious community-building project and definitely worth a look.
What are you doing on your campus to build community, celebrate success, and start rolling that snowball down the hill?
Dave
PS:
Book updates: Teach Like a PIRATE is now listed for the cover price of $24.95, but Amazon is currently maintaining my original 40% discount. That is fantastic news! The Kindle edition is now out and sells for $9.97 (But you’ll be missing that matte cover and some of the pull-out quotes from the printed version!).
Special thanks to Melissa Seideman for featuring the book in this recent blog post.