Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Becoming a District Principal of Innovation

Moving from a school to a district position is both exciting and strange all at the same time.  Being a high school Principal is fast-paced and often unpredictable:  many days begin with a long, 'to-do' list and then end with an even longer one!  Yet the combined energy of a school, the students, and the staff is intoxicating.  At the end of each day, even if everything has not gone according to plan, I always left my office feeling like I had been a part of something that was meaningful.

Being in a district position to this point has been much different.  The Henry Grube Centre where I work is bustling and busy, but in a more orderly and calm manner. The highly committed professionals at the Grube are always on the fly, running out to schools and putting on workshops, shoving lunch down while carrying tote boxes filled with the day's activities for a group of educators. But it is a different energy than we get from kids, and that has been a real change for me.

As my position is new, I have tried to encompass my goals for the year in a diagram that covers six areas;

  1. Championing in the implementation of the new, re-designed curriculum for British Columbia: I am excited at the opportunity to co-create workshops with our District Coordinators to support teachers and administrators in developing our capacity to create, plan, tune and execute exciting new units and lessons for our students.
  2. Continuing the development of Instructional Rounds as a method of reflecting upon and scaling effective practices:  Rounds took off in our district last year, and I hope to see this network-based method of reflecting upon and solving school-based Problems of Practice proliferate through even more of our schools in 2015-16.
  3. Modeling, designing and implementing deeper learning strategies:  With the work that we began with High Tech High last year, and some of the work that I have begun around human-centered design, I want to model pedagogical and problem-solving approaches for our school leaders and educators that reflect the learning environments we want for our students and educators.
  4. Improving our district profile:  much like with deeper learning, I want to build the capacity in our school leaders to use digital tools to make the learning taking place for our students and our teachers visible to our community.
  5. Developing our families of schools:  to create K-12 partnerships, and to eliminate the 'tall walls' between our elementary and secondary schools so that our educators and our students can work together across a continuum rather than a chasm.
  6. Developing innovative capacity:  though the understanding and implementation of a design-based problem-solving model that keeps the learner/user at the center of everything that we do.
And I hope to do all of this through the lens of 'frugal innovation', in which we think INSIDE of the box, and take the resources and talents that we already have and recombine them in unique ways to make us a better district.

Lofty?  Maybe.  

But maybe not.  

Only time will tell.

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