Lessons Learned

This is the second post about how to develop a curriculum review system in one’s school. It deals with answering questions about the culture of one’s school and how folks deal with change. Just as the first post on the big picture, these are questions for members of the community to work through before they begin designing their system.

1) How does your school make decisions?

2) Who is involved?

3) How does your school handle change?

4) What are strengths and weaknesses of your school culture?

5) How can you build on the strengths in (re)designing your system for curriculum creation and review?

6) How can you overcome or lessen the weaknesses?

7) How do your administrators and teachers value the curriculum in the grand scheme of things?

Where are you with your teaming and collaboration at grade levels and departments?

9) What is the level of trust in your teams?

10) How ready are they to divide up the units to be developed or reviewed by just a few team members?

11) What other questions (and answers) come to mind?

Our principal, Brent Loken, began a series of community discussions in our morning gathering today. As our Five Learning Outcomes drive what we do at HIS, it is important that we continually find ways to imbed them into our school culture.

Brent used the phrase “What does being a community contributor look like in the cafeteria, the basketball court, the hallways…?” He then went on to lead a brainstorm of students painting the picture of being a community contributor.

Brent will be leading out these discussions in the coming weeks as we look at all our learning outcomes. I am wondering what are other techniques school leaders are using to make their missions and student learning outcomes a regular, every day part of their students’ lives.