Making our SIP (School Improvement Plan) come alive!
This year I heard about someone on Twitter who decided to post their Board Improvement Plan in a visible space at school to share with students, parents and the community as you see in the photo below.
After hearing this idea via @leblancpeter @tlobaker and @nhamilton647 my Principal, @davidpmarquis, and I have decided to implement this in our school this year with a few additions.
Some big ideas are driving our thinking:
- a vibrant school is one where everyone is learning
- digital artefacts allow us to share in new ways
- administrators should model their efforts to try new things
- administrators should be helping to ‘tell’ the stories about meaningful learning in which students, staff, parents and community members are engaged
- making thinking visible helps us to build knowledge as a community
- constructing artefacts help us to articulate our learning to promote dialogue
- pedagogical documentation needs to be purposeful
How will we do this?
We plan to post an image of the SIP in our hallway at the front of the school that links to photographs and documentation that will demonstrate our learning goals for the year and plans for school improvement. We’ll need to convert some of our current edu-speak into lingo that makes better sense to parents and students…this will be great! We’ll take that a step further and create this digitally as well, so that QR codes posted could take visitors to more interactive online spaces like teacher websites, interviews with staff, students and parents, and evidence of our great learning spaces through text and images as well.
In implementing the thinking routines from Making Thinking Visible from Project Zero at Harvard this past year, I’m thinking that many of the routines for synthesis and exploring ideas will fit in perfectly. I will try to post this work in progress as we get going and share our hiccups and successes!
Learning Zone 