Happy new year 2022-23

 In no other field are people fortunate enough to have two New Years as we are in education. In no other field do you get a fresh start every year. We launched the 2022-23 school year with a new found hope to move forward, support staff and students alike and find the joy in education again. It’s an exciting time and one that I look forward to every year because it provides the chance for a fresh start for everyone, particularly those who have had a hard time in the past. 

I have made a lot of commitments to myself both professionally and personally this school year, especially after the challenges of last school year. I no longer dread walking in to the building every day, and recognize that no one will ever tell me that they recognize they made a mistake. What I’ve realized is that it is up to me to take the small victories and kudos as people saying they value my work. I’ve done a lot of internal work to get myself to recognize this. Currently, a few things I will share here are that I am taking the Yale Happiness course on Coursera, and I purchased a Peleton to up my exercise regimen (which I highly recommend and yes, I am still loving CrossFit with my 5:30 am fam). All of these things have helped me to re-center on my goal to “RISE” this year. They have helped me to be a better educational leader and a better person overall or at least I think they have and that is what matters. 

I have learned that I need to take credit for my work and leadership so I will share some things I am proud of recently, hoping that you will learn something that may help you as well. I’ve had a few opportunities that I have waited a while for: 1. To use design thinking in my school in a meaningful way; 2. To see the e-portfolio come to fruition; 3. To start a school year fully staffed in the departments I lead. 

This year we embarked on using design thinking as the model for our strategic planning. When our districts consultants announced this last spring, I felt energized for the first time in a long time and said FINALLY!! I missed our planning days at the district leadership institute when this was introduced to my administrative team because I was on Zoom with COVID (yes, it finally got me at ISTE like many others after I escaped it for 2+ years and even this has made me feel renewed now that it is over). However, in both our meetings leading up to and after the leadership institute I was able to help my team draft a meaningful plan to involve all of our instructional leaders in this important work. This was important to me because I have wanted to bring the leadership with a focus on teaching and learning back to this team versus the minutia we often spend our monthly meetings talking about. I designed (with help of course!) our IL day to be a design sprint beginning with the chair challenge. We had sprint sessions or commercial breaks that helped to focus the work on the strand of the portrait of a graduate that we thought would be meaningful, “self navigating expert learner” throughout the morning and had longer sessions on design thinking to distill down to a prototype we could test this new approach to strategic thinking with. To do this, we brought in 3 students and had our school principal do an empathy interview around the POG and then spent the afternoon falling in love with our problem and not the solution. This is an important way of thinking that I fell in love with during the Google Innovator Institute. We learned about ideating by individually trying to figure out how we would ensure that ALL students are self navigating expert learners through a sticky note activity where everyone brainstormed individually “How might we?” And then I navigated some of my own thinking on the original planning to have them do the crazy 8’s and really think deeply about solutions to this before they worked again in their groups that included a mix of a STEM, Humanities, and elective course area teachers groups to negotiate what the groups ideas were for a prototype. We ended the day with a gallery walk where each group shared out their thinking and closed by recalling our goals for the afternoon: 1. To bring the joy back to teaching and learning, and 2. To fall in love with the problem and not the solution. My colleagues put together a quick exit slip that we had the ILs complete and we agreed that our administrative team would review the great work and thinking done by our leadership team and come to our first instructional leadership meeting with a prototype to begin testing with a small group of the leadership team. 

We taped the entire day and I know I was not the only one who walked away feeling inspired and ready to dig into this important work and new approach to strategic planning. We also promised that we would not overwhelm the entire staff with this process yet but I am sharing it here because I know it is a game changer and will really help us to become a learning organization again focused on continuous improvement in service to students. That is why I went into education because I want to continue to learn and grow, and never stop. For me it is about best supporting our teachers who are on the front lines everyday with our students, so I was excited to push our leaders thinking and bring the instructional leadership back to this team. Every one of them was engaged in the activities throughout the day and many came and shared how refreshing this approach was. We know that we still need to continue to work on test scores but thinking deeply about teaching and learning is exciting and invigorating. I hope to continue to carry this energy and joy throughout the school year, especially when it gets tough because it will. It always does but I also love those challenges too. Most importantly for me, right now, I am glad I stayed in Wilton this year, I did not think that I would for the first time ever be returning but I am incredibly thankful that I am. 

One of the important lessons I have picked up from the happiness course is to reframe and to practice gratitude which I did a lot during our school closure. I actually felt I hit my stride during that time and I think that is why I took the lessons of last year so hard but I learned and grew a lot last year because of new opportunities (and my own resolve to prove people wrong) while someone else was adjusting to a new role. I will save speaking about the portfolio, my other passion project for another entry and end here by thanking a few people that really and truly helped me to grow through the darkness: Fran Kompar, Ken Dunaj, Melissa Barrett, Dr. Scott Silver Bonito, Maria Coleman, Dr. Chuck Smith and Dr. Kevin Smith. THANK YOU! And I will resolve this year to do my best to be legendary and inspire others as Andrea Leonardi reminded our new teachers this year! I wish every educator a wonderful new year!