Hey team,
Back in May we started our first Crew meeting with this quote: “To start a school is to proclaim what it means to be human” from the original EL Education school design application back in the 1980’s. Tom James, who said this quote, goes on to say: “If you’re going to try to reform schools, restructure them, change them, you have to begin by imagining what a human being can be.” Your role in Realms HS places you at the forefront of educational leadership in our community and in our country. Thank you for the imagination, the courage and vision you have that has led you to re-imagine what humans can be, and how they can act in our communities and on our planet, and most importantly how we can shape schools in support of this vision!!
If you are interested in more of EL’s history you can read this short American RadioWorks article
OK, now down to brass tacks… I am hoping to streamline “whole school” communication when I can by creating a weekly blog post that you can go back to in order to find info or reference things I have pushed out school wide. Kind of similar to a weekly email but in a blog format it might be easier to go back and find past updates. Here is the first post!
Shared Calendar
I have invited all of you to an Outlook calendar called RHS Staff Internal…. there should be an invite in your inbox. This is a calendar that you can add to and is used for any and all events that you want other staff to know about!
Upcoming Meetings – Invited, Encouraged, but not Required
As is pretty obvious, we have a LOT of work to do, both individually and together, to be really ready for the start of school. And while we don’t have to have everything perfectly dialed by September 6th (our 1st day), we DO have enough dialed to communicate preparedness and professionalism to our students and parents!
I have set up some possible meeting times for us to gather, or at least those that can make it! I have invited you to these meetings using our calendar and in order to make it easier for all of us to know who is coming and to make sure the time is productive, please use the Outlook event invitations to indicate which meetings you can and can’t attend!
If you have other suggestions beyond these meetings for other times etc. please let me know!!
“Meet-Greet-DO-(Eat?)” Optional Student Event For Realms HS:
I continue to have students and parents interested in getting together before the school year to meet other students! Given our unique situation, I think it is a GOOD IDEA! So, I have scheduled this for 8/23 in the afternoon. I suspect we will get at least 20-35 kids attending once I put it out there.
Purposes & Agenda:
- help interested kids meet each other before school starts
- get students excited about school start up
- start getting student voice and ownership involved in our planning!
- DRAFT agenda – ideas welcome!
What I need:
- hoping that I can get at least a few of our Realms HS staff (and I will invite a few MS staff to join us!) to commit to helping facilitate this. Can you please use the Outlook event invitation to let me know if you can make it (ASAP!). I will only publicize this event if I know I have at least 3 staff in addition to me to help run it!
Curriculum Orders
Please visit the copy of the District’s Curriculum Order spreadsheet and ADD any requests you have by our “soft due date” of Friday August 10th. If you have ANY QUESTIONS, email me!
Curriculum Planning Update
Planning Tools: After our work in July I am aware that there are a lot of different documents and planning tools floating around out there. Some that have been started and others not. I want to try and slowly build some clarity around these docs, and also build our versions for BOTH Fall expeditions!
- Discipline specific STA’s, 4T’s, Expedition Plans – these are all tools teachers can select from to flesh out your curriculum. I am still thinking on this, but my plan at this point is to ask every teacher to complete at least a semester long STA or an Expedition Plan, but not at the moment both. STA’s are good for those who are not (or only minimally) involved in an expedition. Here is a folder of blanks for all of these different planners.
- Shared Expedition Planner – a shared (interdisciplinary) planning document designed for an internal audience and aimed at helping the expedition teaching team “see the whole”, stay in sync, and deepen interdisciplinary content/experiences. We will build/populate this from your STA or Expedition Plans.
- Expedition Description For Students – an easy to digest document that helps students and parents get excited about the expedition.
- A Question: I am curious about what folks have used in the past to share with students/parents in the way of a “semester syllabus”. This is something I think is important, and the Expedition Description For Students is one piece of this, but each discipline will need something as well… TBD&D (to be discussed and determined!)
Crew & Orientation Planning: Michelle, Karen and I have been slowly working on both our Crew Overview & Plan and also our Orientation Plan. We strongly encourage you to look at our work so far and share feedback using the Comment feature of Google Docs!! AND… THANK YOU to Karen and Michelle for their great work so far.
- Crew Overview – see multiple tabs at bottom. This is a work in progress!
- Orientation Plan – also in progress!
This weekend’s Bulletin Article on Realms and Skyline
Check it out – this will not be the last time we make the news this year – let’s keep the headlines coming by building awesome curriculum and experiences for kids!!