Stories of Us - January 22, 2021 (1)

Stories of Us - January 22, 2021
Posted on 01/22/2021
Partnership Educators,
We had our engagement meeting this evening with site teams of parents, staff, and board members.  It's a great exercise to revisit your goals and to focus on how you will achieve them.  Redding has a bold vision where every student is eager to learn and achieve success with creative, productive, healthy, responsible citizenship.  While that is a long-term, visionary aspiration, our daily focus is on how we will achieve it - and that is through the reliability of what we do every day and the success of our people.
My wife, Veronica, and I have three grown sons, and every summer when they were growing up, we traveled to the coast, historical spots, theme parks, or other locations around the country.  All of our trips were spent in a vehicle traveling to those locations.  From the back seat, the boys seemed to ask me every 10 miles, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"
I think it is human nature to be impatient. We all want to get to the destination.  Over time, I found I was interested in the journey: the precious chance to talk to my wife and kids; listen to forgotten music; view the new or old scenery; and marvel at the greatness of my family.
Collaboration is quite a lot like the journey with your family on vacation.   We are often impatient about getting to our vision or goal and often don't pay attention to the journey.  I want to applaud you all for working to figure out how to use the collaborative process to make and implement action research studies across our district.   Plan, Do Check, Act Cycle, Professional Learning Communities, Exceptional Systems, or Learning Science is all the same.  We use our values, beliefs, and our theories to move a bit closer each and every day towards our vision for all of our students by tying what we are doing to the outcome data of our students.
There's a story about a farmer, riding in his tractor, pulling a plow, and plowing his fields in perfectly straight rows, without any technological aids.  With him in the cab is his young grandson - astute enough to see how perfect his grandfather's rows were.  So, he asked, "Grandpa, how do you make each row so straight?"  Grandpa answered, "I pick out a faraway point on the horizon, and I aim for that point."  All roads lead nowhere if you don't know where you're going.  Throughout one's life, methods may change, maybe multiple times, but the lesson is keeping your eye on the destination.
Life moves at a fast pace.  We all want to get to our destination.  But my hope for you today is that you sit back, relax, and appreciate the world-class educational journey we are on, delivered by the most caring people in the education business.  We never know where great ideas are going to coming from.  Sometimes a seemingly passive visit with a friend, colleague, student, or parent can generate an idea that can grow into something grand.  
Thanks for what you do.  Have a powerful weekend,

 

Rob
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