Put Your Best Foot Forward

 Last Thursday was an important day for our school. We hosted some very important visitors - the deputy Minister of Education and the director of the Toronto District School Board.

Our admin team wanted to impress our guests. Our superintendent recommended our school as the location for this gathering, and we were selected for the honour, so we did not want to let him down either. (The poor man actually fell sick on this day and was unable to attend.)

How did we get ready? We had LOTS of meetings to discuss the agenda and the flow for the tour. My usually relaxed principal was anxious and very concerned that everything go well. We reviewed what to say. We collected artifacts. We wandered the school, checking that everything was in tip-top shape. We had to determine how to deliver our message to recipients that possessed very different levels of familiarity with education. (We couldn't oversimplify but at the same time, we couldn't use too much school terminology.)  I asked our amazing adult helper, Pat McNaughton, to come by and tidy the shelves. We plotted and planned. We were also prepared to be flexible.

Good thing flexibility was part of the plan. Due to uncontrollable circumstances, we were twenty minutes off schedule. My principal pointed out that none of the things that Colleen or Kate saw were staged; these were all typical things that happened in the classes we visited. One of the communications team members from TDSB was there to take photos (like the first one from this blog post, taken from Colleen Russell-Rawlings' social media post) but I snuck in a few of my own. Here's a quick glimpse.

This is Krisha from Communications. She and the strategic advisor to the director were there before the others, so Connie Chan and I talked to them a little bit about the Board Games Club they saw taking place in the library as they entered. They even had a chance to play one of the games our Board Games Club loves the most - Buildzi. Usually Krisha is behind the camera; I'm glad she got to reverse roles a bit.

Here are Colleen and Kate talking with Diana Hong, our Grade 5-6 teacher who is also a K-12 math coach. Diana is a big proponent and supporter of Building Thinking Classrooms. The students are so used to having adults come to observe that they continued doing their work without a second glance at the extra bodies.

This is a photo of Farah Wadia, Grade 8 teacher extraordinaire, with Kate Manson-Smith, the deputy Minister of Education, checking out the art that incorporated social and eco-justice and perspective taking.

There's always things we wish could have done differently. I wish we could have seen all the classes in the school. As it was, we went to five classes. I wish there was a way to introduce the entire staff. We had to cut short our explanation of how we addressed one third of our school improvement plan, the section on belonging, joy and well-being. We covered it in other ways as we shared tales from the academic/achievement strand and the Indigenous education / future success strand, but it's a shame we didn't delve more into how our PLCs help drive our actions. I am filled with admiration for our TDSB director; she is brilliant and perceptive. (I said as much last year when I saw her at Unleashing Learning 2023 - Unleashing Learning 2024 was the very next day after her visit to our school.) I wish that we had time to answer some of the questions Colleen posed about percentage discrepancies and adult support. There's no need for regret. At our post-visit debrief, our admin team agreed that the event went quite smoothly, even with our most unpredictable of students - the kindergarten learners enthusiastically welcomed the grown-ups and after a hug from a little girl, Kate exclaimed that she was not used to getting affection like that as part of her daily work. 

Thank you to everyone that played a part in making the visit such a success. Next week will be a different kind of busy, with Track and Field, Open House and Jump Rope for Heart on the agenda. It's time to put our best feet forward again, this time for our families and school community. (It won't look quite like this, but I just had to share my polka-dot ensemble to end this post!)