January 2, 2014

Happy New Year!
And welcome to our new weblog, our blog, called Learning and Leading!

It's sometimes dangerous to go to a conference. I (Terry) was at the MEMSPA conference in early December. One of the sessions I attended was on using blogs as a better way to communicate with staff and even with parents and students.

Sarah and I are trying this new format as a new way of creating and posting the Weekly Updates, as well as sharing information, posting videos, polling staff, etc. This will become our new way to be more inclusive of the types of information we'd like to share. We can link our blog to twitter accounts, TedTalks, book studies, and more.

This blog, at least for now, will be used only by Cooper staff. Sarah and I will monitor posts for a while as we learn more about how this venue works. Feel free to comment! We will post relavent comments from staff so we are all communicating better.

Any idea why our blog is called "Learning and Leading"? Of course! It's Cooper's mission statement. More than that, it's our mission. Everything we do can and should be measured against its affect on learning and its affect on leading.

We are a LEADERSHIP SCHOOL!! We started this process three years ago. Staff agreed and committed Cooper to The Leader In Me process. We all knew then that the process would take time, that we are evolving the leadership processes and melding our curriculum to match the focus. With the addition of Leadership Notebooks, Data Walls, and +/Delta charts, we continue to progress toward changing the culture, moving us and our students to set and reach personal and academic goals.

In an interesting book, Closing The Attitude Gap, by Baruti Kafele, Principal Kafele examines what happens in schools where teacher have high expectations for student effort, where students set individual goals with teacher help, where goals are monitored for progress and examined for effective practices (by teachers and students) to achieve success. He describes so many of the components of a successful, effective Leader In Me school that Tammy Spangler-Timm and I spoke with him at MEMSPA. He had never heard of The Leader In Me. Yet his success as a principal and the gains of his students and staff are reflected in all the same practices The Leader In Me promotes. He was able to move a middle school labeled as "persistently dangerous" under the No Child Left Behind rules to some of the highest achievement levels in New Jersey. His research on these practices is solid. Principal Kafele is now a national speaker on what really works in education. His book is powerful as a guide to providing unlimited potential for high achievement, while maintaining a whole child approach for each student.

The way Kafele describes his school sounds so much the way I describe Cooper to people: High poverty (his school was 100% free lunch); large gaps in achievement; a dedicated, highly motivated staff; parents interested in progress for their students, but not really knowing how to help make that happen (in fact, some home habits are detrimental). Kafele and his staff were able to overcome the issues of high poverty and parent apathy by focusing on the things they could control. One of the most important changes they made was to focus on mission statements, including school, classroom, and personal mission statements.

We also need to return to a focus on the mission. We are a leadership school. Our mission is Learning and Leading. Many classes are writing mission statements. Bill Lietz shared a power point that helps teachers lead their classes in the process of creating a mission statement. Sarah and I are very interested in your progress on your class mission statements: Why do you and your students come to Cooper every day?