CP School District Opening LID Day

Today was the first LID (Learning Improvement Day) for my district's high schools, all of which assembled at the Tacoma Convention Center. We began with keynote addresses from the interim superintendent, welcoming us back for another year and extending new welcome to those new to the district. He touched on a few challenges we face teaching in CP, including the level of poverty, homelessness, and parents deployed overseas. He congratulated us for choosing CPSD and for considering these factors challenges and not excuses.

CPSD has been placed on the federal District Improvement list, and so one of our year's goals is to raise achievement scores. The other is to provide support--emotional, academic, and otherwise--to students with parents overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are to hold the children and ourselves to high expectations, treat each child with dignity, care, and respect, and maintain an optimistic and positive view of the future. I think much of this falls under the category of things that seem like they should go without saying, and yet need to be revisited often. This would become a theme for the day.

Our second keynote speaker was Dr. Rebera Foston, author of You Don't Life On My Street and more than twenty other books. She also has several Master's degrees and Doctorates (M.D., MPH, MATS, D.Min). She read the title poem for us at the end of her speech, and if you can find the full text, you should read it. She touched on each of the twelve areas we need to be conscious of when kids are acting out or simply not achieving. Her anecdotes were especially powerful, but I would fail miserably if I attempted to recount them here. She called on us to take a sort of Hippocratic Oath in our practice: to first, do no harm.

We then reviewed the District mission statement, and I'm happy to say that my mentor and I began to examine it critically rather than accepting it unquestioned. I began to suspect from this point that we would probably get along well, and so far, I seem to be right.

During lunch, we discussed the school I'll be working in a bit more. It is a Gates Foundation Small Schools focus, with three school 'houses' within one building. The school is centered on the principles espoused by the Coalition for Essential Schools. Intensive periods are combined with integrated humanities classes on alternating days. On Day 1, for instance, we will have 2 sections of Pacific Rim Studies and on Day 2, we will have corresponding English 3 sections with the same students. Really, neither of these are Social Studies or English focused; they are integrated with each other. We also will have two stand alone classes: Current World Issues on one day and AP Government on the other. It is likely, however, that I will not be involved with the AP class.

The school district also engages in a "State of the Art Instruction" initiative. It is a combination of (get this) the "Principles of Learning developed at the University of Pittsburgh" and some National Board Propositions. Mild irony is appreciated; I came across the country to get a new perspective, and up learning stuff from the University of Pittsburgh. The interesting factor here is the idea of "Colleague Groups" that are composed of teachers in like disciplines. We are to meet every couple weeks and constantly be working to improve the quality of our and each other's instruction. We read a chapter written by Carl Glickman on establishing common beliefs on teaching and learning and establishing a collegial (from colleague, not college) atmosphere rather than a conventional or congenial one. The first refers to the traditional fully individually autonomous and non-cooperative teaching environment, and the second to an environment in which teachers are friendly but are not constructively critical for each other. Very Freirean dialogue oriented.

All in all, a good first day, and hopefully the beginning of a great fall experience! Tomorrow, my first day in the building...