Each week our Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) sends out a newsletter to the school highlighting important information, upcoming events, and any learning opportunities that teachers may need. One portion of this newsletter I have added is the Soaring Teachers. In this section, I highlight teacher successes and wonderful opportunities being provided to our students. This also allows other teachers to be aware of what is happening in the building and schedule time for peer-to-peer observations with coverage from the Dean of their grade level to improve their practices. This practice has allowed us to simultaneously leverage our own teachers for in-house professional development on everything from problem-based learning to classroom management and recognize outstanding work at all grade levels. 

I have always been deeply involved with our efforts to solicit community and family involvement both during major milestones like graduaton and during every-day celebrations like game-night and breakfast with a parent events. I have developed a large number of send-home flyers over the years to invite parents and community members into the school, but I believe the artifacts that speak the highest to my efforts' successes are the pictures. 

I am a huge proponent of students owning their learning and being able to explain their current level of accomplishment and where they hope to go next. One way that I have supported this effort in my current school is through our Eagle Excellence Cards. Each student is provided with two cards- one for English and one for Math. Each week, students have a quick conference with their teachers and/or the Dean for their gradelevel to discuss how they are doing and where they want to work on their growth. For the youngest grades, like Kindergarten, this conversation is deeply structured for them with sentence stems and copious guidance. For our older grades like third through fifth, students are in charge of leading the conversation with their cards. 

While celebrating smaller milestones is very important and done at each and every faculty meeting, during daily interactions, and in our weekly newsletter, some of my favorite faculty celebrations will always be those directly related to massively increased student data measures (like the teachers at the Kona Ice truck) and larger recognitions of sustained efforts. For me, these are more meaningful since they took more to attain. Of course, highlighting our school's wonderful efforts at County and State fairs is quite enjoyable as well!