Yesterday I had the unique opportunity to visit a school far away from my own world. Now I would be the first to tell you that schools within New Hampshire are relatively the same, maybe even 95% the same. Visiting another school allows to see first hand the 5% difference that exists between schools. When I used to work in private schools, school visits happened weekly whether through a school activity like sports or through an attempt to see a new process. Private schools just seemed to encourage staff to visit other schools and look for new ideas and innovative ways of doing things. Public schools seem to operate on an island and I am not completely sure why. I could hypothesize that much of that has to do with the pressure of being accountable to both the state and federal government as well as the parents, but it just seems like a missed opportunity. I am thinking as the emerging principal, that part of the emerging process needs to be through seeing new ideas. Conferences attempt to provide us with new ideas, but I find they are often presented by someone who last worked in a school during the Clinton adminstration. You know the dark ages, before blogging. My visit was a short one, but I think I was able to come away with a couple new ideas that could be easily implemented. Just think what my school would look like if I could do six of these a year! I started blogging in order to start the process of conversations about becoming an emerging principal, I just forgot that these conversations take many forms. You can scale a mountain, just don’t forget to look in the swamp.
A couple things I learned (that may or may not be news to you)
1. NECAP Remediation – Help those dragging the school numbers down without teaching everybody to the test
2. Saturday Homework Club – Kinda like the Breakfast Club, but without Mr. Vernon. If one wants to create accountability, nothing could scare some students more than having to go to school on Saturday to finish their work.
