Late Night Slice: Thankful for Leadership Academy

Today I had the opportunity to attend our district's Leadership Academy.  This is a two day academy totally organized by the teachers in our district. A group of dedicated professionals work all year and the presenters are all teachers who choose to share their passion.  It is an amazing opportunity to come together, see friends, share summer conversations but begin to think about the start of the new school year.   This  year our keynote was Dr. Michele Borba and she was inspirational and totally energized me for the start of school in two weeks.  And to think this is what I found on her twitter page:

How excited was I to see that she MT as I was writing my blog tonight?  I struggled between tweeting and taking notes.  There were so many take aways I wanted to share them for my Slice of Life.  

• Start the school year with a discussion asking your students which traits they believe are important as a new class is beginning to build community.  Remember these traits are verbs not nouns.  
• She shared with us her qualities of her legacy teacher. She asked us to think about our favorite teacher. She remembers two rules which are life lessons that I loved."We start what we finish" and the 2 H's:  Are you being helpful or harmful?
• It is our job to lead by example showing students these traits: greeting students at the door, teaching them to look you in the eye "Good Morning" and I loved the idea of a learning log.  Asking students everyday to write down one thing they learned.
• Another take away that i am going to use when starting our class meeting is "Good News for the Day" helping students learn to look for good but also go beyond their own world.  She mentioned  http://www.kidsareheroes.org   which I am going to incorporate into building our global community
• Finally and honestly very touching she disucussed the imprtantnce of knowing everyone's name but also something special about each student.  She had all of us stand up, put our arms around each other and sing "Everybody Knows Your Name" the theme song from Cheers.  It was so cool to be standing in the back looking down and of course singing loudly, sorry Sarah I was a little off key. 

I am always excited even when a little late in joining Two Writing Teachers for Tuesday Slice of Life.