Atlanta in April!

My birthday was last Saturday, April 2, 2016 and I was fortunate to be able to check an item off of my "bucket list."  I was able to speak/present at a National Education Conference.

Several months ago, when I was still Principal at Speedway High School, I submitted a proposal to speak at the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) annual national conference, on the topic of our Professional Learning Community (PLC) that we developed and refined over the last seven (7) years that I was at Speedway.  I found out this winter that my proposal had been accepted and my chosen date to present (the conference was April 2-4) was on my birthday!  To make it even better, the conference was in Atlanta, GA

The PLC is something I'm very passionate about at the high school level. Over eight years ago, two of my veteran teachers came to me with the idea of trying to put a PLC together.  We developed a proposal and gave it to our Superintendent and he approved of the idea.  So, for the last seven years as Principal, our staff met every Monday morning, from 7:50-8:40 am in our HS Library to make a commitment to excellence, focus on the process of teaching and learning, and create the best environment for our students to learn in.

I feel like the presentation went very well.  I presented not only the system that we used but also specific programs and improvements that came out of our collaborative time as well as specific data to show the positive impact our PLC had on our learning community over the seven year period.  I received a lot of positive feedback from the participants plus several requests for more information in the form of emails afterward.  It was a flattering and humbling experience and one I'm glad I was able to participate in.

So, one more item checked off and many, many more to go!