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Reform Symposium: George Curous

The Reform Symposium is in full swing, George Curous is our first session!  His presentation is titled: Identity Day-Revealing the Passions of Our Students.

I hope that you were able to join us, here are the notes I took during the session:

  • Identity day- near the end of the year
  • School philosophy- relationships are central to everything they do, everyone has the ability to be a leader, recognition of the whole person, effective teaching leads to effective learning. Learning must be relevant to the student.
  • Never pass a student without saying something (whether they are in your classroom or not).
  • Distributed leadership, find strengths and capitalize on those strengths.
  • Everything that we do is based on the best interests of the students and then work backward from there.  If you focus on that the confrontations are reduced.
  • Dan Pink’s What’s Your Sentence Video
  • Everyone needs to find their sentence. We aren’t preparing kids for the real world: this is the real world.
  • The “Why” of the day: Identity day was a staff initiative.  A science fair activity where students could set up displays and tell one thing that they are passionate about.  Everyone in the school did this: teachers, students, admin, staff.  “What is one thing about you that you really would love to share about yourself?  Think of the different ways you can share this with others and create some type of display to show your passions.”
  • This was about everyone getting to know each other.  (k-6 school)
  • Keep it simple-share ONE thing!
  • Work as partners with parents.
  • The entire school community was invited.
  • If you take 2 min. a day to learn about the “problem child” by the end of the year they won’t be a problem any more.

I recommend you take a look at this great session so you can see all of the awesome examples of Identity day!

See the recorded session here.

Founder of Anastasis Academy, The Learning Genome Project, 5Sigma Education Conference, tech integration specialist, instructional coach, writer, dreamer.

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