Collegiate Academy Heartbeat
Sunday, January 19, 2020
From the Heart
Team,
I trust everyone had a wonderful weekend and a super great day back at Collegiate Academy. I had a fantastic time in California with my newest grandchild and an enlightening time at the Regional ECHS Mid Winter Conference today in Plano.
Meeting with other ECHS, PTECH, and T-STEM educators gave me new ideas and confirmation that we are doing a lot of great things. In the last session, for schools that have been around a while, we were asked to share a success. As I listened, every success shared included connections, connections with students, connections with community, connections with parents and connections with faculty. We can't do this alone and we will only be GREAT when we connect in everything we do with all stakeholders.
As I finished the book, Above the LIne, chapter 10 quickly became one of my favorites. It is about belief. It is titled The Power of Belief Playbook.
Here are some quotes to ponder this week. We will revisit some as we begin to plan for next year.
from Chapter 10 of Above the LIne
The highest levels of performance are empowered by the deepest levels of belief.
Belief creates vision
Believe creates strength of will
Belief creates resilience
Belief ignites and activates
If you do not believe your students can succeed, they won't. You are the key! Be courageous, Connect with love, Believe they can, and they will.
Let's do this,
Bobbe
Bobbe
The courage to love unconditionally breaks all barriers.
#PhoenixFierce
Together we will make a difference!
Matthew's Thought for the Week
"I like the word “gumption” because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along. It’s an old Scottish word, once used a lot by pioneers, but which, like “kin,” seems to have all but dropped out of use. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.
The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of “enthusiasm,” which means literally “filled with theos,” or God, or Quality. See how that fits?
A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption.
...
The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one’s own stale opinions about it. But it’s nothing exotic. That’s why I like the word.
You see it often in people who return from long, quiet fishing trips. Often they’re a little defensive about having put so much time to “no account” because there’s no intellectual justification for what they’ve been doing. But the returned fisherman usually has a peculiar abundance of gumption, usually for the very same things he was sick to death of a few weeks before. He hasn’t been wasting time. It’s only our limited cultural viewpoint that makes it seem so.
If you’re going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good.
Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven’t got it there’s no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there’s absolutely no way in this whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. It’s bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption."
It's Always Interesting with Cav
If you have any students that you're missing from classes/have in too many classes/have in classes with students that they can't be the best versions of themselves with etc. please let me know. The best thing to do in these situations is to talk to the other teachers that might have that student so that we can do a 1-1 swap, because otherwise by making your life easier I may make someone else's life more difficult.
5th Period Schedules as well as Pathways IV schedules have been completely overhauled. If there are still problems please let me know as soon as possible so that we can give the kids some much needed stability and stop moving them around so much.
If you want Student Aides and are willing to give them a grade/take attendance for them then figure out when they have study hall and send me when you'd like them.
Lauren's Learnings
This week in PLC our World Languages instructional coaches, Karen and Haley will be sharing strategies for a language rich classroom.
Do you ever want to encourage your ELLs to speak more in class, but you're not sure how? What if you could design an amazing learning environment that would not only support your ELLs but ALL of your students? These are the strategies that we will learn more about in PLC.
Much of this content is from the book, 7 Steps to a Language Rich Classroom (this link is to another SMORE that Matt Arend has created to summarizes the book). Dora has purchased a copy for each of us. I will put one on your desk on Tuesday morning. You could read the whole book in one day. It's a super easy read, and it's full of rich resources. I encourage you to look through the book and try one of the strategies before PLC on Friday.
Upcoming Events
January 24 - Volleyball Game