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A middle school principal's dream come true...

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I am so grateful that we were able to take nearly our entire faculty to AMLE, and so proud of our staff for making the day a dream come true for me!

We started the day with a near perfect bus ride into Philadelphia, our driver, (Daraan DeShields), gracefully maneuvered our bus to the main entrance of the Philadelphia Convention Center. He was awesome! He started our day by greeting us with a smile, letting us know his expectations for the bus, and also letting us know he would do everything in his power to ensure our trip was comfortable and safe. From that moment, I knew it was going to be a great day. Daraan obviously buys into our vision of creating a school that teaches kids to love school. He even played the radio for us. Thank you Daraan!

I think all would agree that individually we each got more out of some sessions than we did other sessions. For me Dr. Monte Selby's session on teacher morale and motivation was the most impactful for me. Monte is one of most entertaining and talented presenters I have ever met, (check out his website). My favorite quote from the session... "treats kids as a person, not as a bad behavior." Here is what I learned from the session: Monte talked about the importance of teachers modeling the behaviors they expect to see in their students. For example, if we want kids to smile and greet each other throughout the day, then we should smile and greet each other throughout the day. If kids don't know what it looks like, they're not going to be able to do it. He discussed taking random videos in the hallway and then extracting the footage that shows kids doing the things we want to see more of in our school, (not bloopers). Here is an idea I really liked, at the beginning of every staff meeting, we play a song. During the song staff members write on a whiteboard something they saw recently at Patton that they wish they saw more of. I also like Monte's idea of forming a laughter committee.

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 17, 2017 at 4:15 PM

    Hello Steve. I am very grateful for the opportunity to attend my first AMLE Conference. I attended some very interesting sessions. Rick Wormeli's session entitled "Racism: It's time for a Constructive Conversations in our Schools" helped to further my knowledge about distorted news/media reporting. The relevance of this to education is that when Educators attempt to meet school district's mandates of narrowing the "achievement gap" or "Equity" related issues we can discuss them and not be hindered by an awkward political correctness. I also enjoyed Debbie Silver's session entitled "Square Pegs/Round Holes-Why we need to pay attention to Learning Differences. Ms. Silver has missed her calling as a comedian. Her humor and erudition regarding exceptionalities amongst various student populations was quite interesting and engaging. I really wanted strategies on how to differentiate my instruction beyond just having an occasional video or "hands on" activity. I wanted to learn how to captivate a student's mind with instruction that is accessible and intriguing. I am looking forward to attending next year's conference. The icing on the cake was the theatrical closing or skit in the founding Father's motif. Good Stuff!

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