Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Welcome to Our Blog

Welcome to our blog that we will be using  to communicate and to share information and materials that I hope will help you with your work this year.  I am excited and honored to be working with you.  Both Laura and Lynne have shared lots of good things about you.  I want you to know that my first love has always been working with great teachers to create amazing learning for students.  So this sounds like a great fit for me.

This year we are going to accomplish two major goals--one is to build the leadership capacity at Grand Center.  One of my favorite books is The Art of Possibility by Rosamond and Benjamin Zander. Ben is the director of the Boston Philharmonic and has been since
1979.  In their book, the Zanders discuss the importance in any organization--whether it is an orchestra or a school--for people to be able to lead from any chair.  That is what we will be working on this year--for each and every one of you to cultivate your leadership skills so that  you can step forward with confidence to help shape the work of the Academy.

The second goal is to get very serious about Understanding by Design and to insure that each one of you creates a high quality unit using UbD.  UbD is a commitment to a way of thinking about our work that aligns with much of the best practice that is out there.  We aren't going to try to shape the whole curriculum right now.  Instead we will use a single unit of your choosing to develop the skills and understandings necessary to begin the shift to a new kind of curriculum.

I look forward to our work this year.  Please feel free to email me comments or questions at 1lindahenke@gmail.com or to post them here.  I hope that although I am in Santa Fe, we can create a rich online conversation as we move through our experiences together.