Episode Details

Join me for the Transformative Leadership Summit

Strategic goals line up with the district’s strategic goals. Our vision for Tanana is “give people what they need, when they need it.” This vision applies to staff, students, parents, and other community members as needed.

Our vision for the future of Tanana is clear and has been reviewed throughout the year. Here is the updated 4 year plan. At two times this year, I have met with each teacher individually to discuss the vision for the school and ensure that we are able to make collaborative decisions about the future. Additionally, the Leadership Team Running Agenda reviews and gives information about the trajectory of our school, as well as our Faculty Meeting Running Agenda and our PLC Session Board.

While academic success is surely one of our goals at Tanana, in this building year, there has not been a lot of focus on traditional school data. While we have certainly analyzed and reviewed MAP data, PEAKS data was essentially not useful, and we have focused more on other issues.

One of the major areas of concern related to attendance and tardies. We have systematically documented tardy issues and found that typically less than 5% of our students are tardy, which indicates it is a small problem, and not a widespread issue. We have identified 19 students who are consistently tardy and in the halls and have created a student contract for them. To enable us to identify the students who were the ones causing issues, we created hall passes for teachers to use to monitor student hallway use.

Additionally, we used informal qualitative data to determine next steps for our school this year, asking teachers the areas in which we needed to focus. A review of our progress will be completed at the conclusion of this school year.

Furthermore, at the beginning of the year, Dr. Orr and I met with each teacher to review MAP data and how it would impact their classrooms. We used the documents in this folder for our review with the teachers.

At Tanana Middle School, our success cannot be dependent on the principal’s ability to manage many different initiatives. That is a recipe for disaster. Teachers and other staff take a prominent role in ensuring that plans are successful.

One such area is our advisory options. Each teacher (and staff member that wants to) may submit a new advisory option every two weeks. This list shows all the different options that have been created this year. Each teacher takes responsibility for creating something of value for students. Many items on that list are also student-generated ideas that came from students wanting to have a bigger say in what we do.

Our school librarian was given the directive at the beginning of the year to make the library a “place where we learn and create” and has been given decision-making authority to accomplish that. Mrs. Martin redesigned the library, removed a wall, facilitated technology distribution, and created makerspaces in the library, that change nearly every