New year, fresh start.  Those two simply make sense and go together when I think about the beginning of the school year.  What an opportunity students (and teachers) have to create themselves anew.  The 2014-15 school year is a whole new playing field: a flat, broad, beautiful open space, in which students can give learning and making friends a new shot.  Students who last year may have been reluctant to take on a new challenge have the chance to give it a new go. 

 

The child that struggled with organization can test some new approaches.  I encourage each of us to bring a growth mindset, a belief that we can grow, change, and become more skilled through practice, to each of our 172 days together this year.

 

While our students have been on adventures this summer, the buildings and grounds crew, led by Jesse Schumacher, has been busy getting the building ready for school start.  A couple of new things you will notice in the Middle School are a new and improved storage area in the foyer and a floor-to-ceiling writable whiteboard wall in our Seventh Grade “Outside the Box" Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving classroom.  The lockers have been scrubbed, the hallways spruced, and the doors unlocked.  The only thing that is needed is for the students to fill the hallways.

 

Teachers have designed new lessons and sharpened their own pedagogical skill sets through summer workshops.  While it seems like summer is fun and games, there is not a teacher in the building who has not used this time to create and tweak curriculum, orienting it toward specific skill goals and the achievement of 21^st century competencies.  This is as it should be.  While the average teacher tenure is nineteen years at CA, the curriculum must grow, change and be kept fresh each year.  Having experienced, caring, curricular experts in the classroom helps create conditions necessary for student learning and advancement.

 

I am particularly looking forward to sharing with parents some of our new efforts to support students to reach 6C goals (critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, cultural competency and character) through our ThinkingLAB critical-thinking and problem-solving program.  We have more than 30 intentional experiences ranging from Design Thinking projects to performance tasks prepared to challenge our students.  We know that to be successful, each student will need to be a resourceful, resilient, creative and collaborative problem solver in the future.  We also know that the only way to become these things is through lots and lots of intentional practice.  This is why we embed real world challenges into each of classes and expect students to meet those challenges. 

 

One of my hopes for this year is for each student to experience hard-won, not initially easy, success.  I also hope that each occasionally struggles.  When this happens, it means that our high academic and behavioral bar is helping students work hard to reach their own potential. By encountering appropriate academic challenges, students develop the core reading, writing, math, world language, science and study skills needed to be successful in the most challenging academic environments.

 

I also look forward to our work on the “softer side” of skill set development.  While talking about social and emotional development seems on the surface to be less tangible and measurable than the ability to organize and memorize effectively, study after study points to the importance of these “life skills” to student health, happiness and success.  At CA, we have been doing a great deal of work as a community to further define the character skills we want children to develop, and I will share more about our plans and program as the year unfolds.

 

School years have beginnings, middles and ends.  I particularly enjoy the beginning, because it is so full of possibility.  I hope you will join me in looking forward to this school start and to all the opportunities for challenge, success, failure and learning.  I, for one, can’t wait to see what we create together.