The Major Award

Our school received a major award this week. We have become a Distinguished Title I School. This is a culmination of what our school has been working on for the last few years. The staff did not know about this award and we were not looking to get it, but there it is, right at our doorstep. All the innovation we have been doing, all the research, all the practices we have put into place have given us the opportunity to be recognized for our hard work. All teachers are hard workers and deserve to be recognized. The students performed to our expectations.

We teach and teach, we research and change our teaching styles, we practice and replace ideas, we read about others ideas and write down our own, and we worry about the things we did not do. We are being recognized for the hard work we have done over the last few years of changing our culture and attitudes about students and learning. We are thankful for the award. We have not desired it. We did not even know it was there for schools to earn. We were just doing our jobs to help students learn and be prepared for the world when they enter into it as an adult. We want them to be ready for whatever comes their way. We are not sure what we will see in ten years when those fifth graders are in college or entering the workforce. What we do know is that it is changing and we need them to be prepared for whatever comes their way.

We accept the award on behalf of all the teachers, professional development teachers, conference speakers, district support, and others that have had a hand in making our school a wonderful place to teach and to be taught. Our job now is to keep our standards and expectations high and to keep our students learning. We can do it.

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Why Are You In That Box, Creativity?

I have been spending a lot of time on my computer looking up blogs and videos of speeches that might help myself and my team be better teachers and learners. I feel that a teacher must also keep learning to be a good teacher. Once we stop learning, we should stop teaching. That is the opinion of Glen.

I found a conference speech of Ken Robinson speaking about creativity. He says that schools kill creativity. Schools were set up to teach the head and not the body. So what do we do? I am thinking there has got to be a way to integrate more movement in our classrooms and still get the work done. this could be done with more collaboration on subjects, we could dance more, we could express ourselves without voices and just movement. I am seeing that we are creating a whole lot of minds and they are not creative. We need to feed the creativity.

This is going to be a hard one to do, and yet we need to incorporate more into our curriculum and lessons. We ask the students to be creative with writing and art and to think out of the box, and yet we put them in a box and wonder what they are doing there? We must break out of the old habits and create new ones. So another thing goes into my bag of "what I want to do next year" ideas.

I am wondering if there is a way to have students show what they learn through video and show what they know by movement. I will do more thinking and research about this.