Every Once In Awhile...

Every once in awhile, things come together. Sometimes, they come together better than planned. And sometimes, you don't even realize how well they've come together until you take a step back and take in the whole picture.

Yesterday, our middle school was fortunate to host some visiting teachers from a nearby school wanting to see our PBIS program in action. Let me be clear, we are committed to PBIS. It's not an easy initiative to implement and takes deliberate and consistent action to do so. It also takes tenacity. When you are promoting PBIS, you have to be ready to bounce back the remarks you hear from others (in other schools) who have not bought into the philosophy:

• Why should you reward kids for doing their job?

• Your ideas for prizes are juvenile!

• Do you really think kids care about your (stupid) tickets?

During the visit, we arranged for the teachers to see our recess period (yep, our middle schoolers have a 22 minute recess period with choices of activities), lunch period, hallways,  and classrooms. Our students were amazing throughout the visitations! We also hosted a student panel representing a mixture of students in grades 7 and 8 -- each who had different experiences with PBIS. I wasn't at all ready to hear the depth of their responses:

• PBIS has given me more confidence to do the right thing.

• We used to do bad things to get attention. Now, we get attention for doing what is right.

• Our teachers are happier and make this a great place to learn.

I accompanied the visitors for a short part of their visit and they joked that I had rehearsed with the students. No such thing. Our students spoke from the heart. I had no idea the depth of their responses --- their feelings. I had hoped we were making a difference. Yesterday, the evidence was right there. An amazing teaching assistant and I joked that we could hear music in the background. Remember the Lean On Me scene? We felt like we had just witnessed a reenactment of that commitment by our students. 

That should have been enough of a great day. But, it got better during our faculty meeting. 

As a team, we have worked hard to revamp our faculty meetings. We are trying more of a flipped approach (thank you Peter DeWitt and Tony Sinanis for inspiration). Announcements were out days before by email and screenr video to staff. We were set to dedicate our meeting time to looking at some test data with one of our BOCES experts. But before she got started, we began with our version of a Smackdown (thank you to Brad Currie for inspiration). While most Smackdowns are relative to tech tools, I challenged my team to take one turn during the year at one meeting each to present a tech tool or innovative strategy to their peers. It has become the best part of our meetings! 

Our PEteachers demonstrated a way to use our PBIS tickets with students (using end of class period to accept nominations made by students about other students..this requires the nominating student to express concrete evidence, as seen in PE class, of safe, respectful or responsible behavior). Our 6th grade special education teacher showed how she took an idea of using post its for data collection to a whole new level using an ipad app she found. Our grade 8 ELA teacher, Drew McEvoy, showed off the use of padlet in his ELA class to collect responses from all students during a text discussion. 

We have been doing this as part of our meetings since October and it has quickly become my favorite part! Our visiting speaker from BOCES leaned over to me to tell me how cool this was. I thought she was just making me feel good. I whispered back about what a great faculty I had. She was so impacted by the conversations and collaboration she saw between them. She began her part of the meeting really stressing how much they were doing right. I ran into her today and she was still thinking about the meeting! 

It's one thing for me to tell my staff  (and students) how much I believe in them...and I do. It's another thing to be inspired by my staff (and students) so much that I believe in myself more than I did before.  Days like yesterday are what I will use for fuel to face the rocky days that surely lay ahead. Keep it up team.