Goals for 2011

This was recently published over that the Project PLN site. http://www.openzine.com/aspx/Zine.aspx?IssueID=16482 There are some great educator goals on this page. What are your goals for making the lives of kids better.

Subtlety hasn't been on the tongues of many in the educational debate in 2010. It has been a year of transformational, systemic, nation-wide, and Superman. My hope for 2011, which can be found embedded in my goals, is a renewed sense that subtlety can leverage individual learning and understanding for kids.

Goal 1: Look for ways to extend meaningful learning beyond the last day of May.
I'm blessed to work in a 1:1 environment. I believe that we are still the only public middle school in Missouri that has this technology advantage. It is truly a blessing for our kids, 50% of whom receive free and reduced lunch. It opens doors to passions, communication, and opportunity.We are still working everyday to leverage the power of the 1:1 environment. This was the first winter break that we sent the computers home over the break. I'm hoping that we get positive feedback from family, teachers, and the technology crew. This could pave the way for crafting some summer learning opportunities where students would work at home with the facilitation of one of our teachers. We are looking at opportunities like this in all subject areas that tap into student interests and continue thinking throughout the summer.

Goal 2: Remove redundancies
What did we do without storage units? Did you know that in 2007, self storage was a 20 billion dollar industry? Schools have become as bloated as society when it comes to stuff. From assessments, to reports, to data meetings, and time spent talking and talking and talking. There is a certain level of services that we need to focus our attention on, and our attention should be painstakingly detailed in these areas. We need to make sure the things that we do to ensure quality learning are excellent and always improving, but the other things are anchors on our system, holding it back like a 250 pound marathon runner. Asking ourselves what less do we need as opposed to what more do we need to do should be a question asked not because of financial pressures, but a question asked to create room for truly incredible new innovation.

Goal 3: Build on strengths; technology, expeditions, and partnerships
The work of the last decade is paying off in my district. We have rebuild our climate and culture into a place of learning, and being new to this work, I see my role in 2011 to be a focus on the strengths that got us to this point, primarily the coupling of expeditionary learning and deep technology integration. This mix of screen time and green time is what we do best, and I hope to continue to build on these traditions. For the year ahead, we have many fledgling partnership need need to be finessed into our system. These are the types of partnership that build lateral capacity in both human and financial resources for our programming. Our strengths will feel the tension of holding onto success or risking failure. My goal is to take intelligent risks for kids as we launch into new areas of collaboration.

Anyone want to help? I'll need everyone from my PLN as well as the parents, students, and teachers to make any of this vision a truly possibility. Let me know I can help your school meet its goals.