Goals Update

The home office is quite organized! Wow!

Not only is it free of garbage and recycling, I can look around and choose to work on the projects that I have on the go. And I have a small table where I can spread out when I don't want to be on the computer. My scrapbooking, my leadership books, my files are all at my fingertips. Even my watercolour supplies are within reach. Now, I just have to make the time to actually pull these things out and work on and with them. :-)

My school office looks tidy, but there is still a lot of redundancy to clear through. I have been taking a bit of time each day to clear out files and to consolidate information in places easy to find and easy to access.

Next Monday, I shall have a couple of visitors from the Northern Tier Leadership group, one of the supervisors and a colleague. They will be going on a tour of the school and talking with me about by job as instructional leader in my school. I am getting quite excited and I plan to use this weekend to gather up the last of the materials I will need to work through this interview.

Just today, I sat for a few minutes at my desk and reflected - things are going quite well - I am beginning to have time to be in classrooms again and time to sit with staff when they need to show me something they are working on. It's awesome! I love that feeling!

Critical to Achieving Balance - Celebration!

Through appreciation and celebration we show people that they are significant and their contributions are vital to our overall success. Soumya Mitra, MC Corporation (The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes & Posner).

It seems we are often too busy to have fun and play games. However, if we don't take the time to celebrate, one will begin to wonder - what is this all for anyway. Why are we working so hard?

At school, we are working hard to differentiate instruction, provide reading interventions, and get through the curriculum. The students are working hard to stay caught up, learn new skills, and become better citizens. Isn't celebrating as a community a skill? I think so.

So how do we celebrate and still give credibility to the work that is being done. Kouzes & Posner state that the recognition has to be personal and celebration must be done in a spirit of community. They also state that "public celebrations of accomplishment build commitment, because they make people's actions visible to their peers and therefore difficult to deny or revoke." :-)

In order to create this spirit of community, we have to work on spirit building. Taking time to visit each others' classrooms, giving each other a high five at the completion of a project, and sharing success stories in the staff room are also about spirit building.

I've been working at making the staff room a place to share success stories instead of a place to complain, and I am in the process of looking for some meaningful posters to hang up in the room that would encourage more positive conversations. I may end up making some of my own so that they are more personal. I will also be asking the staff at the next staff meeting what ideas they have for making the staff room a positive place to hang out.

Ideas for celebrations include: assembly presentations, cupcake Fridays, honour roll and attendance certificates at half time as well as at the end of the year, fun activities planned by kids for kids, contests that involve the instructional focus, awards, and just applauding our accomplishments.

Short List of Goals

I don't usually share my goals - that way, if I don't accomplish them, no one knows but me. Isn't that silly?!

Now, being the educational leader that I am, I try to set a good example. :-)

In order to find motivation for achieving goals, one needs to share them with someone - otherwise there is less accountability. And, if one really wants to achieve a goal, all sorts of motivation is needed.

So, here goes:

Short term (next few weeks): Get organized to include balance: mental, spiritual, physical, social (mostly to clean out my offices at home and at work, and my work out room at home so that I can have the tools I will need to achieve balance close at hand and in some sort of order).

Mid-range (next year or two): Get healthy and fit again; that is, establish a fitness regimen and get eating healthier.

Long range (before I'm 60): Have a book ready to go to a publisher. I've been putting it off long enough. :-)

Now, according to Covey and Greff, if I keep these goals where I can see them, and do just one thing to get me closer each day, I will be successful.

If nothing else, it will give me something to blog about! :-)

Goal Setting vs New Year's Resolutions

Each year, I try to review my goals as opposed to setting New Year's resolutions. I find it more fulfilling to achieve a goal than to stick to a resolution.

I dig out my copy of Steven Covey's First Things First and an old guidance book entitled Holistic Learning: Success in the Classroom and in Life by Julius Greff. Covey goes into the philosophy of setting goals that would meet our physical, social, mental, and spiritual needs. Self-awareness, reflection and planning theoretically allow us to live and work, doing the important things versus the things that are emergent or wasting our time. Greff has a section devoted to the demonstration of how goal setting can be accomplished through brainstorming and short listing. I find both to be effective tools in reviewing and setting my own goals.

Because we have more than one role in life, it is important to find balance between them. For example, my role as principal is no less and no more important than my role as grandmother. However, at different times, each role pulls at me significantly more than the other. Still, a balance is needed if I am to meet all of my needs as a human being. It is in an attempt to find this balance, that I once again review my goals in life. :-)

New Beginnings

This past year, there have been several changes in our small school: declining enrollment and as a result, budget constraints; and the resignation of a well-known and well-liked teacher. We've also downsized our numbers of educational assistants in an effort to re-align resources and provide as much certified staffing as possible. I've also stepped back from a second school that I was principal of in an effort to become more of a help to the small school I'm in.

As I sit in my office at home, I am mentally preparing for a new timetable, new supervision schedule and a new way of working with students in transition or in need of special education. Sometimes it helps to just sit and reflect upon vision I have for the school.

First of all, the parents in the community have varying levels of commitment to the school. Some have a history in that they attended this school or had family attend the school at different times since its institution. Some have had good experiences and some have had bad experiences in the school. Secondly, in a community where there are fewer and fewer students to draw from and where there is an alternative school just down the road, it becomes quite problematic to keep the enrollment up. In addition, the school is a Catholic School, and this contributes a whole other set of factors to consider for parents looking to enroll their children. Other considerations include: class sizes, lack of resources, and fewer opportunities for competition.

I believe that our school has many strengths: our Catholicity, the caring and compassion we show each student regardless of race, ability or creed, the small class sizes, a successful Tiered reading program, an effective discipline procedure, strong competitive girls sports team, experts on staff in Maths & Sciences & the humanities, a FSL teacher, certified educational assistants, full day, every day Kindergarten, and the playschool right in our own building. We are still teaching Kindergarten to Grade 9. Our students and staff make up a family where we pray together every day, we do our best work, and we help each other do well.

So how do we get our community to see us as the school of choice? We try to get news out to the papers and the community in our newsletters; we invite the community in for our Christmas dinner and celebrations of learning; we promote the school whenever we get a chance. Is this enough? What else can we do?