Monday Moanin Thoughts #216 Planning Summit 2016, A Principal’s Perspective

Happy warm August Monday Moanin to all of you. This past week 116 Educators attended the 5th Hickey Planning Summit. The goal of the day is to plan, collaborate , and get tasks accomplished for the 2016-17 school year. Walt Kozlowski, a Middle School Principal attended his first Summit. Walt wrote about his experience at the Summit on his web page http://servantprincipal.com/.  Please enjoy his perspective and his thoughts regarding his experience.

“As I arrived at The Hickey Leadership Planning Summit, I was greeted by a noticeable positive energy in the room. I reviewed the list of participants and identified a few people I knew and soon realized I had been assigned to sit with one of them.

To start the day, our host, Dan Hickey provided us food for thought about culture. Within ten minutes, I had picked up a useful idea from my tablemates, which I plan to implement at my school.

As those around me collaborated with their teams, I dug into some things I had on the back-burner, but want to give attention to this year. I focused on developing some things for my school, but also observed the interactions between members of some of the teams in the room.

The primary purpose for the day was to get things done . . . and I did. But the informal sharing among participants and the three “lecture burst” presentations from other administrators really made the drive worthwhile.

The best part of the event, however, was that there was no complaining about the things we have to do or about how bad we have it as educators. There was little mention of mandates. There was no piling on of additional, irrelevant content. Participants were not talking about rules. They were not focused on the things we have to do. They were focused on the things we get to do: the things that make our schools great places to be, the things we do because we know they are good for students.

School leaders (administrators and teachers) spent the day focused on how to make their schools the best they can be, not because they were being told they have to, but because they wanted to.

Believe it or not, that’s why most of us do the work we do.
We want to help our students achieve.
We want our staffs to succeed.
We want to make a difference.”

Thanks Walt. Have a great week and keep finding the good stuff.

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