2018 VSBA Annual Convention

Over the past 18 months we engaged our school and central leadership in the development of nine cultural norm statements to specifically identify behaviors that are necessary to change our culture to support innovative, learner-centered practices, but we were then faced with challenges of how to communicate these norms to teachers and other staff in very practical ways. Guided by our core value of collaboration, we worked with a very talented group of young learners from Jefferson Forest High School to write, direct, and perform a series of skits that illustrated one or more of our cultural norms. Eight of these skits were performed live during our annual leadership training event in June 2018 and were used to facilitate discussions about school culture among principals and other staff. Each of the young learners also joined a small group discussion in order to provide the student perspective in these discussions. Based on the overwhelming positive response to the live skits, we then worked with these same young learners to produce film versions that we debuted at our August back-to-school gathering for all teachers, while making additional films available for training purposes at each school in the future. During this presentation you will hear our story from the perspective of our superintendent and the young learner who directed and produced both the live skits and film versions. We will also share one or two of the films and engage session participants in some of the same professional learning activities that we conducted with our teachers and leaders this past summer.