Starting Another New School Year!

Last week Wednesday, I started my 5th year at The Oakridge School! I am excited with what the new school year brings!

Over the last 2 years, I served as both the chair of a Research and Design Committee to explore block scheduling for our school, and served on the implementation committee to bring our block schedule to fruition. So, this year we started with what we are calling our Customized Block Schedule. It truly is customized to be very Oakridge, and meet the needs of our students. The single biggest driving factor on both committees was, how can we best serve our students, what is best for our students? We knew as a faculty, this may mean more duties for us, and we are meeting this challenge to give our students the best experience possible!

This past spring I was presented with another leadership opportunity by our administration, to be a member of the professional development committee for the next 2 years. I accepted! I am extremely excited to be on this committee and help our community of teachers get more professional development.  As a committee, we were thinking about the different options that are available to us for professional development, and we developed a theme: We Serve. We serve our students, our parents, our faculty and staff colleagues, our community, and ourselves. We then explored platforms that we could use to mark professional development achievements. We decided to go with Badge List. Badge List is a platform that allows for organizations to create and earn badges based on what micro-credentials that organization wants to set. We realized we needed a platform that would serve both faculty and staff members, not just one or the other.  We also wanted a platform that we could individualize the professional development to each person's needs, or each department's needs, or each division's needs. Badge List is easy to use and also very versatile!

We are still in the infancy of using Badge List. We just rolled it out to our faculty and staff on Friday of last week. So far, we have a lot of teachers who are earning multiple badges! It is very exciting to see this buy-in!  One teacher has already earned 10 badges! I love that there is such a variety of different ways to make professional development fun!

Here are a couple of photos from Day 1 of 2 of my Tech classes!