Things got really real at Manor New Tech HS in Week 4. On Tuesday, we launched our Clubs/Interventions program. And on Wednesday, our beloved principal, Steve Zipkes, retired.
This week, I used my spreadsheet powers for good by creating the Club/Intervention schedule and by continually modifying it in response to teacher- and student-requested changes. I had to create a new club, Run Club, to absorb about forty students who hadn’t chosen a club. Two of them came to me on Tuesday and asked if they were really in Run Club and I said Yes and they were very happy. Turns out that they had not signed up for a club because they wanted to be in Run Club and that wasn’t one of the choices in the Club Survey. Thanks to the Run Club, I have completed 10,000+ steps on every day I’ve run the club. The Run Club members are pretty great. They all stay active for the entire club period unless they’re in presentation clothes. There are even two girls that run sprint intervals because one of them is a part of the Cross Country team.
On Wednesday, I went to a training lead by Lead4ward in Corpus Christi, called EOC by the Sea. They modeled a lot of nice strategies for promoting Access to and Transfer of Knowledge. I still need to type my notes and share them with the teachers teaching EOC tested courses. Here are two of the things I made at the training:
An animal cell
A Tic Tac Toe Concept Map
Here’s the nice view I got to enjoy alone during lunch:
On Tuesday afternoon, Steve Zipkes told the staff he was retiring in order to take care of his sick mother. On Wednesday, Steve told the entire school about his retirement in Family Circle. Because of the EOC training, I was not there for the latter event. I heard it was very heartfelt and the students were very upset, but they also showed their commitment to the school family when Steve lead his last Our House cheer. I wish I could have been there. The school and the student have continued to learn and work hard despite the big absence we feel with Zipkes gone.
In the Wendy Schimel’s Physics class, students were able to successfully complete their Solar Car builds and start gathering data.
I walked through a Biology class where students were creating representations of biomes and their associated food webs. I walked through with Ana Coronado, our new Science director and I loved her energy and enthusiasm. I enjoyed talked to the students about their biomes. Many of them were able to make nice connections about the organisms in their biomes.
On Friday, I did some walk throughs with Lisa Kutsch. Lisa was super impressed with Jazmine Castanon’s poise, clarity and accuracy. She had a hard time believing that she’s a student teacher. In Maria Blanco’s class we got to watch some presentations and learn about a new way of doing collaboration evaluations. She created a survey with many collaboration expectations that the students keep as a reference in the back of their notebooks. For each collaboration eval, she hands out a quarter sheet of paper with the letters of the criteria that students will use to evaluate their team mates. The students assign the scores and tally the totals for each teammate. They also answer open-ended reflection questions which are also listed in the Collaboration Survey reference sheet.
On Thursday and Friday, I facilitated professional development sessions with teachers focused on teacher-student conflict resolution and parent phone calls. We used this article to kick start the conversation about conflict resolution. We brainstormed how to have conversations with students aimed at uncovering their unique challenges and brainstorming how to overcome these. I really enjoyed hearing all the strategies teachers have employed to manage conflicts constructively. My respect for our staff grew a lot after hearing about all their efforts to work positively with students.
All these conversations have made me think a lot about Control vs. Relationships. I think when teachers focus too much on control, they sometimes sacrifice developing relationships and nurturing learning. From experience, I’ve found that when I committed a lot of thought and energy into developing positive relationships with students and helping them develop the confidence needed to learn Physics, then they naturally followed me. But early in my career when I focused a lot of energy on getting them to follow my directions, then there was no guarantee they would follow me and lesser odds that they learned from me. Both approaches require a lot of energy, but the former is much more fulfilling.