When a staff meeting goes well...

Wednesday was our staff meeting.  I was so nervous that day.  I kept saying to my Assistant Principal, "This is either going to be amazing or it is going to suck!"

A lot of planning went into the 90 minute meeting.  I had three teachers come with me to attend a presentation by David Jakes (@djakes).  He walked us through a design thinking challenge around 21st century learning.

We came back from this experience jazzed!  I had this group meet many times and discuss how we wanted to work the staff through a similar activity to start thinking about what learning needs to look like and how the set-up of the classroom is important to make this happen. We planned, created, thought about and worked out all the details of the meeting.

We began the meeting with assigned groups.  We tried to mix up the staff to break them out of their department groups.  It was interesting watching the walk in and say, "Really?" or make a funny face when they saw the assigned seating. I responded with "Is this how our kids feel when you move them around?"  We had the AC/DC going on the speakers, snacks on the tables, post it notes and sharpies were everywhere.

We started off the meeting with a few slides about mindset for design.  We then presented the guiding question "What constitutes a 21st century learning experience?" Staff worked in pairs to dig deep into what the looks, sounds, feels like for students, staff, parents and community.  They wrote big ideas onto post it notes with sharpies.

After working in pairs, the groups got back together and
looked at all of their post-its.  They found trends within all the data collected.  From there, the groups wrote up 5 statements that reflect the guiding questions.  They wrote these statements on large post-its. Each teacher was given 5 stickers.
 They were directed to move around the room, read their colleagues' ideas, and put a sticker next to their 5 favorite.

They came up with some great phrases that we will use as our guide for next year.

We decided to use post-its, sharpies and poster paper for this meeting and this was an intentional decision.  We did not want this experience to be about the technology.  We are not making these changes to our teaching and classroom environments because we are going 1:1 with iPads.  We are redoing how and what we teach because that is what is good for students.  The technology we are providing is only a tool to help with the learning.  There are lots of tools in our toolbox, and we need to create spaces where students and TEACHERS are inspired to learn and create and use all the tools we have.

Here are all 6 posters:

We ended the presentation with this video.  

Thanks to Eric Saibel (@ecsaibel) for telling me about it. It was the perfect end to our discussion.

I arrived at work today to an email from a teacher that said "By the way, great staff meeting.  Left with some great ideas.  I did create my first floor plan this afternoon and I would not mind sharing it with you. " Another staff member sent me a vox that said "A productive staff meeting!"  That's what you want to hear!

#NASSP15 day 2 reflection

Day 2 was equally as fabulous as day 1.  I started my day with Todd Whitaker talking about What Great Principals Do.  My favorite take aways of his presentation were:

• Treat every student with respect and dignity every day, all the time, 10 out of 10 days. Great principals.
• Great principals know they have to teach the teachers.
• Great principals know that people are the problem and the solution.  Programs will not fix this.
• Great principals don’t let things happen randomly.
• Great principals know to teach all the teachers at once so “They know that THEY ALL KNOW”. This way they hold each other accountable.
• Great principals know that they are responsible for the culture in the school.

Such powerful thoughts about what are role really is as a site principal.

Then, I attended a workshop about online PD. The ideas I got were amazing. Creating teacher written online PD for teachers to participate in an a cohort using sophia.org or google classroom. I am inspired to spend some time working with my district to create this.

There was a makerspace workshop. I saw the potential of what the library could be. I can't wait for my library to be a place for students to collaborative, creative, critical think, and communicate. It is a place for students to tinker, play, relax, think and invest.

The final presentation was by Jason Markey (@JasonMMarkey) and Jimmy Casas (@casas_jimmy) about Leading Change in School. The big take away was this quote “You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety.”-by Maslow. We need to be gentle disruptors to the system. We do this by:

• Be Courageous
• Embrace Failure
• Model Expectations

I also appreciated Jimmy's quote "You can’t let anyone take away our excellence.

You also get it back every morning." No one got into education to just be "good", everyone wants to be "great". As leaders, we need to help everyone get to their great.

Jason also talked about this concept for staff. Concept: Start, STOP, share: Tell me something you are going to start this year, stop this year, and share with your PLN. With everything we are adding to teacher's plate, the need to take items off their plate. This is a good reminder for them.

We need to remember that the only barrier to our own learning is our own willingness to learn. This is what we, as site principal, need to remember

#NASSP15 #Ignite15 day 1 reflection

So, I haven't posted in a while.  I was using all the excusing we use when we are trying to avoid things.  I am "too busy", "overwhelmed", "no one reads this", "there are more important things to do" and "I suck at this".

Well,  I am currently attending #NASSP15 in San Diego and Eric Sheninger (@E_Sheninger ) reminded me that is is important to blog.  He also reminded me the importance of not making excuses, but making time.  So, I am making the time.

The lineup for today has been amazing.  I started the day with the #NASSP15 digital principals.  They were talking about mission and vision. The hit on the importance of communicating the vision to all the stakeholders.

Eric Sheninger was in motivating self.  He really hit on how are we evaluating the tech we use is helping the learning.  The three big questions I need to reflect on about my school is: How is technology being integrated with purpose? Collect assessments and see how tech integrated in the learning. How do you currently measure the effectiveness of technology integration to support student learning? Now, how do we do this.

I also got some great tips about sortd for gmail and evernote. It reminded me that someday I will learn evernote.

I attended a forum by Linda Darling-Hammond about a variety of educational topics. She talked a lot about the "Why" regarding CCSS, 21st century skills and technology in schools.

I ended my day with @daisydyerduerr presenting about Digital Tools for Digital Leaders. She talked about zite and flipboard.  I am so bad about using a curation method to gather research and information.  She inspired me to look into this.  I had also never heard of Touchcast.  It is a quick video making app for your Tablet.  I can't wait to try this when I get back.

It has been a great day of learning for myself.  I have to remember to fill myself with ideas and tools to support my staff.  I also have to remember to do the things that make my practice better.  I can't be full of excuses any longer.

Going 1:1... and not going gray! Staff PD

So, after attending #NASSP15 today, I opened by blogger for the first time in months.  I have been "too busy" to blog.  I just haven't made the time.  But, I found this blog that I wrote in August that I did not publish.  SO, I decided this was step one.  Publish what I have.   So, here it is.

Have you ever had a day that went so well, you wonder if it really did?  That is how our 1:1 PD session went for day one.  Here is a link to the agenda, however, the agenda doesn't tell you the details.

The teachers that we are training are at all different levels.  We have some pioneers who have been 1:1 or 2:1 in their classrooms for a few years to teachers who still you a chalkboard.

Our first challenge was organizing a day that would be thought-provoking, interesting, challenging, and not too overwhelming for everyone.  We started the day with the teachers walking around and answering questions about how 1:1 would affect the classroom, teacher, student, school and community.  This gave the teachers the opportunity to share fears, challenges, and hopes for the program.  Next was a guest speaker, who has been 1:1 for 3 years, talk about her challenges during the first year.  This allowed teachers to ask her questions about how she managed, changed, and created lessons for the classroom.  They also got to ask the classroom control questions.

After a short break, we did chromebook bingo.  I created a bingo card with squares to challenge my experts and squares that were not as hard.  Teachers worked together to figure out how to do these functions on the chromebook.  Of course, we had cheesy prizes to make it a little more energetic and fun!

After providing lunch, we went over the SAMR model and talk about how it was ok to be in substitution phase at the moment.  We also discussed that our goal was a blended learning model.  Paper and pen should go with the technology use in the classroom.  Then, teachers had about 1.5 hours to create a lesson.

After all of this, we went back to the posters from the morning.  Teachers marked items they still had questions or concerns about.  Over half of the items listed were no longer a question or concern.  For day 1 of the PD (out of 3 days) that is a great result!

The "we" is the PCS 1:1 team of +ReneeSemik (@ReneeKSemik), +LoriDeen (@lorideen), +JaneEscobedo (@jescobedo101) and me (Emily Dunnagan).

A successful district PD day

August 15, 2014,  I took 17, 819 steps before my fitbit died.  It was a long day!  Thank god I had my #petk12adminteam there to help me.  The plan was to have the afternoon of workshops at my school.  This turned into all elementary and half of the secondary on site all morning.  Then, all 400 teachers there all afternoon.

The schedule was key.  I worked with the district office to create a schedule for the day.  I learned a lot about how to put out the schedule and the changes I would make next time in the structure of the document.  I tried to take a lead from #gafesummit, but I ran out of time to pull it off.


The morning went well.  Teachers were in the classrooms working on one of the three district goals or the year. The internet seemed ok and there were no real complaints. Lunch came the district organized a BBQ for all the teachers.  This went well and then the Superintendent addressed all teachers in the gym.



The afternoon was full of workshops.  When we hosted #nbcue in the spring, I didn't attend or teach any workshops.  I wanted to be available to solve problems.  This time I decided I wanted to teach.  My sessions on Google Draw went well.  I need to practice to #gafesummitt Marin in October.  However, not being around for tech/facility support was a problem.


I realized I should have had some of my secondary admin folks help out a little more.  I need to remember to ask for help.  I also realized how united the elementary admin are in their efforts.  I feel so honored to be included with the group of admin.

Going 1:1... and not going gray! The Roll out

Our chromebooks arrived really late.  Three days before schools started, to be honest.  There was no way we were going to get the 900 chromebooks unboxed, taken out of the plastic, scanned into google's management system, organized and to the schools without some help.

Help came in the form of our amazing admin team.  Elementary, Junior High, High School, Alt Ed, and District office all came together for 7 hours and unboxed, took out of the plastic, tagged and loaded into the management system 700 chromebooks.  As you can see, we even made 4 years help us!

There was no way we could have done this without the help of Ron Everett, Steve Bolman, Mila Kell,   Deb Richardson, Fran Hansel, Linda Scheele, Bennett Holley, Becky Lofton, Sheila Garvey, Catina Haugen, Amy Fadeji, Emily Kleinholz, Ashley Williams, and Nancy Emanuale.

Then it was time to roll out the chromebooks to the kids.  It took us 2 days to organize 476 chromebooks. The first day was spent organizing the chromebooks into classes (they arrived not sorted).  This took 3 people to complete.  The second day was checking to see who had not attended a chromebook orientation meeting and marking those chromebooks.  Students did not receive their chromebook until they attended. (My last 2 chromebook meetings were packed!) The last step was putting the chromebooks into the cases and putting labels on the cases.  We did all hands on deck for this part.  We had 3 hours and 8 people working on this.  We hit the target.  At 3pm on Friday we were done.  Roll out started Monday at 8:30am.

During the actual roll out, our Assistant Principal, Mr. Holley, addressed the students.  He reminded them of the rules about the chromebook, where you could use them, to charge them, and to be careful.  Then students were taken into a classroom where we passed out the chromebook.  We made sure every student could log into their account and wrote their email address and password on a piece of paper  with also had the chromebook rules on it. They left ready to go!  Four months into the process and the kiddos finally have the chromebooks.

The "we" is the PCS 1:1 team of +ReneeSemik (@ReneeKSemik),  +LoriDeen (@lorideen), +JaneEscobedo (@jescobedo101) and me (Emily Dunnagan).

Going 1:1...and not going gray! Preplanning

This year my 8th graders are piloting 1:1 for the district.  It is a very exciting, innovative, and stressful time in my career.  I spent the summer learning and planning with my co-planners (Thanks +Renee Semik (@ReneeKSemik) , +Lori Deen (@lorideen) and +Jane Escobedo (@jescobedo101) .  (See summer posts).  We decided that one of the first things we needed to do communicated with the parents.

In July, we created a parent orientation.  The team felt we needed parents to understand the cost and the value (both educationally and monetarily) so that they would help their student be more responsible. We planned to pass out the chromebooks at orientation.  In August, we scheduled 5 or 6 parent orientationshoping that the Chromebook would be like a "Carrot" and get people to come.  Well, the chromebooks were late, really late. So late, that we passed them out the second week of school.  No chromebooks, no carrot.  Therefore, we needed way more than 6 or 7 meetings.  Personally, I did 20 chromebook orientations to get all 476 parents and students to attend them.

Each parent meeting was about 90 minutes of my time.  Between setting up, greeting parents and students, presenting, answering questions and collecting the technology donation, that was 1800 minutes or 30 hours.  Plus, I needed a Spanish translator at all trainings and someone to help me collect the monies.  (The technology donation is their insurance for first lost or broken chromebook).

Parents truly appreciated hearing why we were going 1:1 and how it was to help their student.  In fact, I only had 1 student's parent out of my 476 students say their student could not bring home the Chromebook and asked for it to stay at school.  I made sure they had access at home and accommodated this.  I was impressed that the other 99% were on board to this "new" thing for our area.


So far, so good.

The "we" is the PCS 1:1 team of +Renee Semik (@ReneeKSemik), +Lori Deen (@lorideen), +Jane Escobedo (@jescobedo101) and me (Emily Dunnagan).