STORIES OF RE-BRANDING

By 2020 Owen will:    

• 1.Be recognized as a B school exceeding “Expected Growth”

• 2.Be fully Implementing Global Learning

• 3.Have a high level of Family and Community Involvement

William H. Owen is a Title I, Spanish Immersion school, with 432 students. Owen had the optics of being a global school, but was not producing global learners schoolwide.  With the help of Participate and our Global Committee we began putting some goals in place to ensure all students were being exposed to global learning. Teachers had to complete several modules to learn how to implement global learning in their lesson plans. We began assigning grade levels continents. Our Kindergarten team-North-Central America, 1st grade-Oceania, 2nd grade- Africa, 3rd-Asia, 4th grade-Europe, and 5th grade-South America.  We began to center all of Title I events around a Global theme. Virtual Global field trips became a requirement for all teachers. Our teachers were excited and that made our students excited and now our parents are excited! Because of the excitement, our school was the recipient of the “Deck your School Award”. All of our students and staff received a Participate t-shirts to include a visit from the Participate CEO David Young and other staff. We had a day long visit featuring Owen on Participate’s social media channel and blog.

Owen continues growing and learning during our second year of being a Particiapte school. We continue to increase our presence on Twitter and Facebook in order to attract students from all over the district.  We have added our Fruits and Vegetable grant to our program and we place a great emphasis on where our fruits and vegetables come from. All of our students, (not just our Immersion students) are better prepared for a global society. This experience is taking us around the world, but having a 20/20 vision helps us to FOCUS!

What made the difference within that one year?  Although there are many little pieces of the puzzle that fit together to make an amazing school year, my staff and I would attribute most of our success into three C’s:  collaboration and communication which eventually led to staff confidence.

After being named principal in the summer, it was detrimental for me take time to meet my staff and gather some intel and insight about Nebo Elementary.  I spent thirty minutes to an hour with each staff member, in which time I did much more listening than talking. It was extremely insightful for me to hear my staff’s perceptions of our school’s strengths as well as specific needs of students and staff that should be addressed in order to move our school forward.  Staff members were able to clearly articulate our strengths and needs and this first display of staff leadership was a crucial starting point for school growth.

After individual face-to-face meetings with each school employee, our school hosted a two-day summer workshop for all certified staff focused on curriculum standards and building relationships between general education staff and instructional support staff.  This was simply the beginning of many communicative and collaborative efforts. The expectation was established for staff to plan in-depth instruction collaboratively each week during two scheduled PLC meetings, and in addition, meet with other push-in folks such as AIG, EC, ESL and other instructional support personnel to make certain that standards-based instruction clearly aligned across all areas and grade levels. 

Another piece of our collaborative success can be attributed to what we call our “focus points” google document which provides specific information on how our specials staff can incorporate different grade level academic standards within their PE, Music, Art, and Technology lessons (examples of the google document shared between one grade level and the specials staff and instructional staff are shown below).  These collaborative opportunities which were built into our school schedule allowed for our staff to adequately communicate with each other on a daily or weekly basis. These small steps made a tremendous difference. My staff members were (and still are) simply amazing! The administrative responsibility was to simply provide the beginning PLC agendas, organize opportunities for communication and collaboration between staff and ask the correct questions to guide reflective thinking about instruction individually and collectively as a school team. As a result of putting these simple steps in place, over time, teacher leadership through collaboration and communication blossomed which resulted in increased confidence in their abilities to grow our students academically! 

Within mere weeks of school starting, the strengths of my staff became evident and I utilized classroom walk throughs, observations and data points as opportunities to praise and recognize staff members individually and collectively.  Feedback is crucial to all of us, whether it is in the form of specific praise or in the form of asking questions to help guide a personal reflective process for a better outcome. It took an entire school year, but my staff finally began to see what I could see from the very beginning:  Nebo Elementary was not destined to be a low-performing school!  One of the greatest blessings in my career has been to not only watch the staff confidence grow, but also our students’ confidence.  Confidence over time results in efficacy, which blossoms into leadership. North Carolina has dedicated, amazing, and talented educators across our great state, and I’m proud to say that Nebo Elementary School staff fit in that category, too.  I’m still serving at Nebo this year, and it’s been a tremendous pleasure to see this school community realize the true potential of our staff and students. (If you are interested in learning more about our school’s story, feel free to reach out to me or our staff.)    EXAMPLE OF NEBO"S FOCUS POINTS

My first task as a leader was to arm the building with staff who believed in our students.  I spent the summer prior to my first school year as principal, hiring 60% of my teaching staff and I was very strategic about the kinds professionals I wanted for the students.  I needed tough minded, gritty teachers who were crazy enough to invest in a vision that was bigger than test scores and state letter grades. We needed a whole child approach that would address the educational, relational, mental/behavioral and even spiritual needs of our students.  When you have a history of failure, it becomes much more than what you do; you begin to believe it’s who you are! So we began by focusing on the climate and culture for both students and staff because real change happens from the inside-out. I remember watching a video of the late Rita Pierson about being a champion for kids.  She talked about a mantra she began saying with her students about them being somebody and our school has adopted it as our “Tiger Declaration”. I knew that I had to attack the way kids thought about themselves before they would change their investment in their lives. So we began (and still do) each day with our declaration:

I am somebody

I was somebody when I came

I’ll be a better somebody when I leave

I am responsible for the education I get here

I have things to do, people to impress and places to go

I am powerful

And I am strong

Because I am somebody

Not only did this begin to seep into the psyche of our students, but it began to radically challenge the perceptions of the adults in their school community.  Whenever a students behavior or academic performance didn’t match their declaration we began to remind them of what has become a kind of promise to themselves, that they are somebody who can do something to change their lives.  I knew that I needed the students to have a vision of themselves and their future that reached beyond the life they are currently living. Our staff worked to develop a vision statement that more accurately reflected our radical approach to the work we engaged. “Every child, every day is the Tiger way!” became our rally cry, our calling card and our big dream for our students.  I wanted our school community to know that every student mattered to us and not just the ones who were compliant in school. As often as I can, I expose various members of our community, from politicians to parents to the recitation of our student declaration and the usual response is “that’s amazing. This strategy is one of the ways that we are rebranding our school.

Prior to my principalship I read a book by Erwin McManus entitle The Barbarian Way.  In the book the author included a picture of a tiger with people caring spears, swords and other weapons as a symbol of a rebellion against the status quo.  This has become a rallying symbol for our staff. We celebrate innovation and individuality that supports our mission and vision. Our staff also developed a declaration that incorporated our newly developed vision statement which we recite each time we are together for staff meetings:

We are a dynamic group of educators, here by choice and not by chance.

We are not satisfied with the status quo, because our students deserve better.

We are innovative, creative and motivated change agents.

And we believe that our school is a great place to work and learn because,

Every child everyday is the Tiger Way!

Every newsletter, letter home, printed advertisement, weekly school wide phone message, email etc all have our vision statement incorporated. Mindset changes have lead to a 50% decrease in our discipline referrals as we commit to keeping students in class so that they can have access to a quality education.   We have grown from one AIG student to 32, have decreased our teacher turnover rate to 14% and exceeded academic growth expectations!

I believe that our current trajectory has everything to do with the development of a culture that refuses to accept the circumstances of a child’s challenges as that child’s identity and consequently the identity of our school.  We are far from out of the woods, but we are determined to keep finding ways to turn our school into a place that produces great learners that add value to their communities as they pursue their dreams. Amazing things happen when you trust educators to be great and give them an environment in which they can thrive.  We are Tigers together.