"Critical Friend" Kevin

For much of my career in education, I strived to be as task-oriented as possible. Teachers and principals know, there is always something we can be doing to make a difference to one more student. I always made sure I was doing that "something." If I wasn't working on a task, I was wasting valuable time. That said, one of my most successful New Year's Resolutions pushed me to quit thinking this way. An NSRF Critical Friends activity called "Compass Points" taught me that strong educators, strong leaders, and strong people possess qualities of the four different directions on a compass. While we usually have one dominant direction, it is important to value the strengths of people who come from different directions, and to push ourselves to exhibit the traits of each direction. When I did this activity, I recognized that the traits of the "south" may have been those that I demonstrated least. According to the NSRF descriptors, south is the direct...

As a fitting finish for a productive year, last night's final Borgia and Beyond meeting of 2015-2016 produced ideas that could have students thinking differently in 2016-2017. Borgia and Beyond is a piece of our school's continuous-improvement effort. It involves monthly meetings where stakeholders gather to address essential questions regarding the school. Last night, we used an "Affinity Mapping Protocol" to get at two key questions: 1. How can St. Francis Borgia become a community of inquiry, where students collectively question, reason, connect, deliberate, challenge, and problem-solve? and 2. How can St. Francis Borgia for its spirit of Catholic Heritage through the teaching of ethics and service? Importantly, the Affinity Mapping Protocol is a product of the National School Reform Faculty's Critical Friends Group trainings. Their protocols are designed to generate ideas from the unknown. So, I did not know what clever ideas our stakeholders might generate to...