"Critical Friend" Kevin

This year, our principal came up with a fun way for the administrative team to appreciate teachers. She purchased three different types of "pins" that principals can distribute to faculty or staff. We have pins to give teachers who make notable contributions to our PLC teams and we have pins for adults who go above and beyond for our students. In addition, we have an "apple" pin to give to teachers following a good lesson. We didn't make an official announcement about these pins. We just started distributing them, here and there, in November. As a result, faculty and staff have been pleasantly surprised when we have had something to share, aside from some positive words.  Earlier this month, I put an inordinate amount of time into a presentation. It was the type of presentation that did not require extensive preparation. In short, we had decided that students weren't taking our district writing prompt seriously. The sophomores who had to participate did ...

I became at father and a teacher almost simultaneously. In the same school year that I completed my student teaching (1999-2000), I began dating a woman who had a two year-old daughter. And while I didn't do a whole lot of parenting that year, the next year (as a first year teacher), I proposed to that woman and my parental role increased as we got closer to our wedding day. At the time, I didn't realize how much I didn't know about parenting or teaching, but it was not because I didn't have great examples to draw from. My parents were amazing and I had some incredible teachers, but the influences of each of these sets of people may need to be a future blog post. Today, I need to write about movies . Last month, my now teenage daughter had a hip surgery that left her relatively immobile. "Entertaining her," it turns out, was the excuse I needed to play more Monopoly and Risk in the past month than I have played in the other 19 years of her life. I also striv...

I had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop this week that I hope saves teachers dozens of hours this semester, and it's based on this quote by grading guru Ken O'Connor: "Don't leave students out of the grading process. Involve students; they can - and should - play key roles in assessment and grading that promote achievement." The workshop was designed to share a series of practical strategies that could be used to have students assess themselves and one another, taking some of the pressure off the teacher to be the sole provider of feedback in the classroom. For instance, one strategy asks students to assess their confidence while taking an assessment and then their preparation after seeing the scores of an assessment: Another strategy helped students to set "SMART Goals" for the assistance they will seek between assessments: Evaluating one's preparation before, during, and after an assessment was also encouraged: While...

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...

Before coming to Borgia, I had never experienced anything quite like our annual dinner auction. The thematic decorations alone are amazing! However, I think it is the collection of special people who come together to make this event happen, and the special people who attend that make the event truly amazing. This year, the coordinating committee continued a tradition of incorporating our Knight mascot into the theme by calling it a "Knight of Heroes." A year into our involvement in the area's new Navy ROTC program, we invited ROTC students to present the colors and senior Joe Schafer to play Reveille in an effort to pay tribute to the heroes who had served our country's branches of the military. Each wall of the gym featured a branch of the military in large, bubble letters, allowing the names of those who had served (or were serving) to be inscribed in the middle.  With that, the night began in a special way. However, we were just getting started! Each year, Borgia r...

Earlier this school year our students began taking a new test called the Aspire. This test was designed to give students, their parents, and the school an accurate prediction of the student's future ACT score. As should be expected, some students did very well. We should anticipate more high ACT averages in Borgia's future. But more importantly, some students did not do as well as they might have hoped. What should we do about that? While the ACT is NOT always a predictor of future success (I don't believe), it is a way for colleges to decide who to let in and who to give scholarships to. One of our goals should be to help students create as many post-high school options as possible, so that is one reason why the ACT is important to me...and that is why the Aspire is so important to me. If we can find a way to get ACT scores up, students will have more options after graduating from Borgia. However, the Aspire provides us with more than an opportunity to help ACT scores. As ...