June 19

The SAN Script – the week of June 20-24

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St. Anthony this week

Monday, June 20

Sabina in all week

Songs practice in gym gr.1-6 (Leaving Ceremony)

Tuesday, June 21

Culture Shock Hip Hop Dance Lessons

Dorothy Stanyar, volunteer, in Mrs. Rupnik’s class PM only

Track and Field Day

Wednesday, June 22

Leaving Ceremony and Year End Mass

Wastefree Wednesday Today- LAST DAY

Weeding Wednesday

Thursday, June 23

Recycle Day at St. Anthony Catholic School- PLEASE recycle today – all material to be left inside  near the parking lot door

Awards Ceremony

Family BBQ – 4:30 – 7:00pm

Friday, June 24

Final St. Anthony Superstar award

Another Reason to Blog; Proactive Through Reflection

part of a post by George Couros – blogging as part of the reflective process, something we will be focusing on for next year

Another Reason to Blog; Proactive Through Reflection

Before I started blogging, I now look back and realize how all over the place I was with some of the initiatives that I was hoping to implement within our schools early on in my school administration career.  I felt that with all of the great things that I read through on Twitter or other social sites, that I wanted to implement all of these in my own school.  I have learned and understood that this is something that is (and can be) extremely frustrating to a staff.  Although I am sure my staff knew I meant well, if we were to jump on every “great” initiative, I know we would never become a “great” school.  Too much energy is expended on implementing too many things, as opposed to narrowing our focus and getting to that transformative stage in our learning.

Then I started blogging and it actually helped me to slow down and FOCUS.  I started to be more thoughtful, critical, and reflective of what I was learning and was not so quick to jump on things like flipped classrooms and BYOD.  As I continue to read the book “Humanize“, one of the quotes that stuck out to me regards what great leaders do:

“There are, actually, plenty of books that can inspire self-reflection, buy nothing beats taking the time to write in a journal. The best leaders we’ve ever met all keep journals, so we think it is a good habit to develop.”Notter and Grant (2011)

So I look back at my own “journal”(my blog)  and see some continuous themes that seem to come up in my writing (“What is best for kids? Narrow our focus. Start with your why. Transformative learning) and how they have led me to actually be more proactive in the work that we do, as opposed to being more reactive to everything we see.  Before I started blogging, I would tend to be much more reactive than proactive.  By looking back, it was much easier to look forward.

But here is the thing when your “blog” is your journal.  I can google what I have learned.  This may not seem like a big deal (and didn’t) when I first started but over 500 posts into blogging, it makes a huge difference.  I have no idea how I would have done this if I would have wrote all of my learning in a book.  Often when moving forward, I literally google search my own work and by effectively using “tags” and “categories”, it has been much easier to find what I have learned before.  (It would also be easy to talk about how I have also developed my digital footprint as a learner but that is for another blog post.)

We will be moving to blogging as a reflection tool next year – this is part of our new SIPSAW