Tag Archives: school

Building Community

It takes thought and intentional action to build community in a classroom or a school. The chances of it happening organically are small, and even if it does build this way, it is likely to be uneven. Community building takes effort, it takes vision or at least cooperation in a focused direction… And even then it isn’t guaranteed.

It’s easy for students to form small groups and these groups can be open and accepting or they can be closed and cold. The art of community building is creating scenarios or activities where students must work together outside of these naturally forming groups. But that’s just the first step. The next step is to ensure that these scenarios or activities are ones where these organized groups can and will find success working together.

The next step is around expectations. It’s about explicitly showing and helping groups work together through conflict. Whether students or adults, there are times when we need to work with people who are a bit challenging to work with. They can be bossy, lazy, distracted, distracting, and even annoying. Not everyone is easy to work with. How is conflict handled? Are groups left alone to sort it out for themselves? Or is problem solving both provided and explicitly taught?

In teacher organized groups, are roles clearly defined? This can be done by the group, not just the teacher, but division of roles in a group help to provide the group with guide rails. This increases individual accountability and reduces the opportunity for conflict. And when groups of people can find mutual success in a project, that helps to build community.

Common goals, common practices, high expectations about how we treat each other, and planned opportunities to share common positive experiences all contribute to fostering and building good community. It doesn’t happen on its own. And if there’s one more thing that can help build community it’s food. Opportunities to eat together and celebrate together enrich the community’s familiarity and collegiality. Expecting community to build without consciously working to develop it will usually end in a disappointing way. And while the effort to build community may not always be rewarding, it is much more likely that the effort is rewarded far more than just expecting community to build organically.

Put your own oxygen mask on first

Arianna Huffington is 74 years old and she just recently started a new AI business. She started the Huffington Post at age 55 and sold it 6 years later for 315 million dollars. In this The Diary of a CEO podcast interview with Steven Bartlett she shares this gem of a story.

The moral of the story is simple: Leaders need to take care of themselves, and get enough sleep, in order to be at their best. She says, “All the science now makes it very clear that when we are depleted we are going to make bad decisions.”

Then quoting Jeff Bezos, “I sleep 8 hours a night… I’m judged by the quality of my decisions, not the quantity of my decisions.”

As the new school year begins, take this as a reminder to take care of yourself first, if you really want to take care of your staff and students. It’s not good enough to only exercise, and eat well, and get enough sleep when you are not busy. You owe it to yourself, those you serve, and your job, to treat yourself well. It’s not selfish to put on your oxygen mask first, it’s how you get enough air to take care of others.

Build good habits and take the time to care for yourself first, when you are busiest, and it will become very easy to do so all the time. You will benefit as a person, as a friend, as a partner, as a parent, as an employee, and as a leader. It starts with you taking care of you.

Pre-game Blahs

School starts on Tuesday. The past couple weeks have been building up, and up, and the hype is real. I’m getting excited about the year ahead. I want great things for my school community, and I’m looking forward to a wonderful year.

But it’s still a couple days away and the hype-up has been too long. Today I just feel drained. I’m taking a rest day on my workouts after pushing hard for two days and having a hard grind of a walk scheduled for tomorrow morning. I have a few errands to do, (I’m sitting in my car writing this after doing one of them now), and honestly I just feel blah.

I know this will change and the excitement will hit me again starting tomorrow night and well into the day Tuesday, but I’m just going to accept today as a low-energy, low productivity day. I’ll just let the blahs play themselves out.

Scope and sequence

As a principal of two very different schools, I juggle a lot of timelines and deadlines that are different for each school. My ‘regular’ school isn’t so regular, being very small and having year-long courses unlike the rest of the district high schools that have 2 semesters. My online school has thousands of part-time students, and 3 different funding periods compared to just one for all the other schools in the district. For that school, I have over 30 teachers in the 8 other high schools that have to meet different funding criteria for me compared to what they have to do for courses they teach in the high school… Everywhere I turn, I have timelines, expectations, and differentiated learning opportunities that are not the same in other schools.

As I approach retirement in the next few years, I realize that my position would be somewhat overwhelming to come into. This is true mostly around understanding the timing of everything needed to be done. The reality is that there are many people I know that could step into my job and do great things… but they would also feel like the first year was only about managing all the pieces and not about actually leading.

So, I’m starting the year with a focus on scope and sequence. It’s time for me to track all the timelines that for me are on autopilot, and I just get done. I’m going to lay out a year long plan for items and procedures that I normally just do, with a specific focus on the things that are not part of the usual processes that happen in other schools.

I enjoy the environments I’ve worked in with these two schools. There is a lot of opportunity for out-of-the-box thinking. With that comes some diverse needs and skills that really fit outside of ‘normal’. A detailed scope and sequence will help make the transition into this role much smoother than it would be without one.

First official day back

I’m headed to our school board office this morning for our first admin meeting of the year. There are years when this day arrives and I sit in bewilderment wondering what happened to my summer? But this year is one of those years where I’ve felt like I’ve had a wonderful break and I’m ready for the new year.

My regular routine starts today. I’m not writing this at a random time of day, or squeezing my writing in right before bed (like last night). Rather, I’m up early, I’ve already meditated, and I’m getting on the treadmill as soon as I publish this. It feels good to be back to my routine.

The new year brings with it both excitement and trepidation. I always start the year with specific goals in mind, and I feel enthusiastic, yet apprehensive. The year always holds so much promise. New plans, new students, new and unexpected scenarios all lie ahead.

There is a lot of prep work to do, but no amount of prep makes you feel 100% prepared. Planning only gets you so far when you are dealing with so many people in different roles. You might be calm and ready, but others will be nervous and unpredictable. No matter how well planned you may be, unexpected things will happen.

Schools are places of growth and learning, and real learning doesn’t happen smoothly and with conformity. Things don’t always go as planned. Yet, that’s part of the excitement. The unknown, the unexpected, the surprises along the way, the connections you make, the solutions you work on, and the collaboration required, are all part of what makes this job exciting and unique.

It’s the first day back, and so a whole new adventure begins…

Year End Headspace

I can’t escape it. The end of the school year always fills me with melancholy. I don’t mean melancholy defined as ‘sadness and depression’ but rather ‘pensive reflection or contemplation’. Whether I consider the year good or bad, great or average, it doesn’t matter, I still feel I should have done more. I measure not so much my success but rather I face the loss of opportunity to have accomplished even greater things: Better connections to students and teachers; more engagement with the learning in classrooms; better work/life balance; and even more time out of my office.

It was a good year. It was made especially good because last year was such a challenge with my health among other things that were emotionally draining. And despite it being a really good year this year in comparison to the last, the melancholy fills me. I contemplate what else I could have done. I don’t allow myself the satisfaction of the year being positive, and the year ends not in celebration but in contemplation.

So, I’ll wallow in this feeling for a while. I’ll consider the ‘could have beens’ and the ‘should have beens’, and I’ll sit with the lost opportunities for a bit, as I do my year-end cleanup. Then in the coming weeks I’ll be able to look back with a clearer mind, and more positive perspective on the school year that was. But that appreciation can’t seem to arrive until I’ve gone through this contemplative headspace. It’s a year end process that I seem to require myself to go through, and today is the day it has decided to hit me.

The (backhanded) Compliment

She approached me with a glowing smile “Mr. Truss can I take a picture with you?”

“Of course.”

It was just a few minutes after convocation was over and she’d crossed the stage and received her diploma.

“You were my favourite principal ever… actually no that’s not it… you were my least obnoxious principal.”

“Well thank you, I’m honoured.”

Most people would call that a backhanded compliment, but when you are talking to a neurodivergent student, and you’ve worked with a few of them, you see the real compliment. You really are honoured by it.

After all, despite the words said, here is a student, graduated and thrilled a to be moving on, and she wants to take a picture with me.

The Crash

So often when a break in the school year comes my body crashes. Often I end up sick with a cold, because I’m too busy to let myself get sick, then the lull comes and my body lets go. Luckily that didn’t happen to end the year. But yesterday I was doing a leg workout and on my second goblet squat my right knee did a little buckle and I twinged a muscle in my mid back.

This morning I took a deep breath in and my back seized. It’s a brutal recognition of my age when breathing can be the trigger to pain. It has been several years since I’ve had a crash this bad, my whole back has seized to protect this one overstressed muscle.

The stress of the last 3 months got to me and now I’ve got to take it really easy. My Norwegian Protocol won’t happen on this Sunday, I’ll have to make it up next week. Today I stretch, hot tub, stretch, and rest. And hopefully my recovery is swift. I didn’t get sick, but my body still crashed.

The Finger

At almost any other school this would have been an immediate suspension. But this was an alternate school, and attendance for this high needs kid was more important than a consequence that kept him out of school. He had already been sent home the day before and it was the morning of the next school day. I had the kid in my office with his foster mom. We discussed what was done, the seriousness of it, and laid out future consequences if it were to happen again.

This kid sat silently staring at me the whole time. In the year and a half or so that I’d been principal of the school I think he’d never kept eye contact with me for more than a second, but now his stare was unwavering. His foster mom, whom he had a very good connection with, spoke on his behalf while he sat staring at me, no emotion expressed on his face.

This was a first offence and I didn’t believe it would happen again so I looked at him and said, “All you need to do now is tell me that you won’t do this again and you can head to class.” He sat and stared. In these situations I allow a lot of silent pause time. I don’t get uncomfortable with silence nearly as quickly as others, so I waited. It only took four to five seconds then he moved.

He slowly took his hands out of his pockets, staring at me the whole time. Then looking me right in the eyes he said, “Every time I see your face, my fingers get a boner.” And his hands made fists resting on his legs, with both his middle fingers stick up in the air at me.

His foster mom breathed out a sigh, and said under her breath, “Oh Jesus,” as she turned her head to look out the window. I bit my cheek. I wanted to burst out laughing but that would have been the wrong kind of encouragement for this kid. I bit harder, forcing myself not to laugh, trying to show as little affect as this kid was showing me. He slowly lowered his finger boners and tucked his hands back into his pockets.

Silence.

“All you need to do is tell me that you won’t do this again and you can head to class.”

Silence.

He stared. I waited. The wait time didn’t seem to bother either of us, but his poor step mom looked tortured. It had to be about a 10-12 second pause. An eternity of silence in the moment. Then he spoke up.

“I won’t do it again… can I go now?”

“Yes.”

The only further consequence was that I didn’t get any eye contact from him the rest of the year. At first I would walk in the room and see him turn away, and I wouldn’t address him at all, I gave him space. Later I’d greet him with a ‘good morning’ just as I would any other student, and he’d turn away and ignore me. It took until June before he’d even acknowledge that I was in the room.

He graduated that year without any other incidences.

Now and the Future – iHub Grad Address 2024

I can’t describe the joy of participating in grad at Inquiry Hub. These students are amazing. Our student focused show, with performances and videos that highlight the whole school are such a community building and community honouring event. The night warmed my heart, and I teared up more than once.

Here is my grad address. I really don’t have more to say, other than it was an evening that recharged my battery. It reminded me of why I love my job.

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Now and the Future – iHub Grad Address 2024

Greetings Honoured Guests, Parents, Family Members, Teachers, and Students including our very special Grads of 2024.

In your yearbooks, I wrote this as part of my message to you:

Asking questions is key to learning and I think at Inquiry Hub we do a pretty good job of getting students to ask good questions… and then answer them. There is a lot of conversations, dialogue, and debate that happen inside our school walls, and from that students learn not just about things, but they also learn the skills to discuss and negotiate and support their ideas in meaningful ways… and sometimes even to change their minds. A growth mindset is so much better to navigate life with, compared to a fixed mindset.

In a civil society, dialogue is the one problem-solving strategy that should be sacred. To do this, free speech is essential. But right now, outside the walls of our schools, there is a culture of ‘attack the opposition’ that is very scary. We need to be resilient when hearing opposing views, and understand that, we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views, unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference. When we can’t have conversations with people that have different views, we don’t grow as a culture or as a society.

That was a message for right now. There is so much conflict and strife in the world, and it can sometimes feel a little bleak.

But here’s the thing, I’m really excited about the future our grads have before them. It’s a future that is beyond my ability to predict, but I’m going to try anyway.

Our grads understand how to see the world from multiple perspectives.

You understand the challenges but you are also solution oriented. And you are going to have tools and strategies that no other generation has had. 

Here are four predictions:

  1. You will have better AI than we can imagine. What we think is amazing now will look like child’s play in the future. I didn’t have Google growing up, I had paper encyclopedias. In a few short years the Artificial Intelligence available will look to us now like what an iPhone would be to someone living in the 1920’s. (Oh, and by the way, I did not use AI to wrote this.)
  2. You will not live in a world that has an energy crisis, or one that harvests natural resources to create energy. Energy will be almost free if not completely free.
  3. You will live longer. Longevity research is reaching a point where more and more healthy years will be added to your life faster than you age.
  4. You will retire sooner. More of your life will be filled by doing want you want to do, rather than what you need to do to work and make an income.

All this to say that while it seems like us old folks have left you a pretty messed up world, we are less than a decade away from some key turning points where you have more freedom and choice, more access to cheap energy, and more free time than we could ever have imagined as recently as when you were in Grade 9.

It’s an exciting time to think about what the future holds, and when I think about you all as creators, artists, thinkers, dreamers, and leaders, I’m excited about your generation building the future I get to grow old in. 

Inquiry Hub isn’t perfect, but it is a very special school. It is a place where our students feel they belong. A place where you get to be courageous learners and leaders, and a place that I hope you carry fond memories from. 

To the class of 2024, I can’t wait to see what the future holds for you… and for what you will do to help shape that future. Be brave, be strong, and help build a community where everyone feels they have a place, and a way to contribute. 

Thank you.