Thanking Our Community Partners

The Mount Shasta High School Leadership Class and teacher Sue Villareal, put together a MSHS Community Partnership bulletin board located in the front hall way of the school. This is a way they are  recognizing and thanking our community partners. Great work MSHS students and staff. In order to build and sustain our partnerships, we must recognize and thank them for their contributions to our schools and communities. A partnership is a two way exchange of support and mutual benefit.

"Embrace and Drive Change"

Happy Camp Principal, Angelika Brown, shared her notes with me from their opening site staff meeting. I was inspired by the conversation and the staff response to the question "What are the qualities of change?". It sure helps to put qualities behind a statement or value such as "Embrace and Drive Change". It helps us and our students embrace the values and work toward achieving them.

Notes from the meeting:

Norms for staff meetings:

Take turns talking, no side conversations, come prepared, and come on time!

Angelika will ask everyone for their opinion and we are taking turns so everyone will be heard or a person can say pass after they feel they said everything that they wanted to say.

When your turn comes please stay on the topic and not more than a 1 minute response.

Staff is always encouraged to share topics and can be put on the agenda for the weekly staff meetings.

Motto of the School Year:

“Embrace and Drive Change”

“Change is the end result of all true learning” Leo Buscaglia

What are the qualities of change?

Staff responded:
complain less, acceptance, focus on current needs and less on past mistakes, flexibility, awareness of different student’s needs, role modeling, look straight at the heart, open mindedness, positive focus, willingness to learn, long suffering, patience with ourselves, learn new technology, change brings inner growth, diversity being able to change quickly, innovation, change is a potential solution, “I can’t versus I can”, productive don’t get sucked into their drama, talk less, sharing/collaboration, be kind to each other, patience, more humor laughing and chocolate, support each other, be kind to each other, respect our students, remember we are the teachers and they are the children, don’t lower ourselves to their level, building rapport

Great Work

School Is Open!

You know something is different in our small communities when you experience a traffic jam on a street that is normally calm and quiet at 7:45 am. Today each of our High Schools opened for the 2011-12 school year. As parents and students made their way to their local high school, the streets filled with anticipation and excitement. This year we will graduate the class of 2012. Thank you to our staff, students, parents, and community members for all your support and encouragement during our opening staff development work and planning. We are proud of our communities and we look forward to an outstanding school year.

This year as we work with each of our communities to forge new partnerships and work to develop new and exciting learning experiences for our students, we must work with a sense of urgency. We must provide our students with the skills and tools that they will need to face and deal with the changes in our society and communities that are occurring at a rapid pace. Working together we can build a sustainable educational and economic foundation for our schools and communities and provide our students with the experiences and support necessary to become citizens of our communities and our global society.

The educational experience must look and feel different for our students. We must lead the change by being willing to learn and be the seekers of new experiences for our students and ourselves.

We are going to continue to develop our organizational values. Several that I recognize are going to be important to embrace as we move forward include (many of these are taken form Zappos.com but I believe they are relevant to our educational organization):

1. Deliver WOW experiences for all students
2. Develop partnerships that support the learning experience
3. Embrace and drive change
4. Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded
5. Pursue growth and learning
6. Build open and honest relationships with communication
7. Build a positive team and family spirit
8. Do more with less
9. Be passionate and determined
10. Be humble


Have a great year.
Sincerely,
Mike Matheson

Educators Today

How do we ensure that we are doing this? How can we keep our organization and profession current with the latest teaching and learning practices?

Proud of our Teachers and Students

This past week I had the pleasure of hosting our very own Damon Zeller and Randi Greenspan as presenters at the Weed Rotary Club. They and two students gave a presentation about the new Geometry and Construction Program that they have developed at Weed High School. It is impressive how these teachers and students have taken on a project that is bigger that any one individual teacher, student, or community partner. This is truly a collaborative effort that takes commitment, learning, and risk to implement. Take a look at the Power Point Presentation that they put together. The last slide shows the variety of community partners involved in this project. We can all be proud of the efforts and accomplishments of our Siskiyou Union High School Staff members as they work to develop the programs and experiences that prepare students for success in the 21^st century. Thank you to Randi, Damon, and your students for your outstanding work.

Welcome to geometry & construction whs

View more presentations from mathesonm.

Do Your Own Research

The other day I was working to develop a management meeting agenda and because of some articles that I had been reading I wanted to talk about 21^st century skills. What are they, how do we teach them, and how do we measure them?

So I started my research here: Google – 21^st century high school learning standards

And ended up here:

http://cell.uindy.edu/NTHS/NTHSresources.php

and here

http://cell.uindy.edu/docs/NewSkillNewCentury.pdf

and here

http://www.p21.org/index.php

and here

http://cell.uindy.edu/NTHS/NTHSVideo.php (watch the video)

and here

http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning (wow - look at these videos)

Try it for yourself. Google 21st century learning skills and see what amazing places you end up visiting. Share them with me and others by posting what you fine here.

Learning and Teaching in the 21st Century

This short video illustrates how learning and teaching should be evolving to prepare our students for success in this ever changing world.

The question I keep asking myself is what do we need to do so that we can make the pedagogical shifts necessary to allow this type of learning and teaching to take place in all settings?

Source: http://esheninger.blogspot.com/2011/03/teaching-in-21st-century.html

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