What are you excellent at?

I throw a great knuckle ball. I will even go as far as saying I'm excellent at it, especially with a softball. But saying that I'm excellent means I'm confident that I can show you, on command, consistently. It sounds a little arrogant. But it feels oh so good. :)

Admitting you're excellent at something means you'd better be darn good.Being excellent requires knowing what excellent looks like, how to get there, followed up with relentless, unwavering, exhaustive work.

Our goal at John Campbell Primary is to be striving, everyday, towards excellence. We can be excellent at being fun and we can be excellent at celebrating students. But until we are excellent at helping students make academic growth, we are not excellent.

Our teaching staff has created a Compact of Excellence. This compact includes two components that focus on our Best Self, and our Best Work. Teachers identified two key statements that if we hold ourselves and each other accountable, our students will achieve excellence in their academic growth. One statement focuses on what we can do as a individual, the other focuses on the work our teams are doing. And interestingly enough, both statements are very similar.

Best Self: I will frequently evaluate my impact, that I can change my instruction so ALL students can learn to their full potential. When I need help I will ask for help.

Best Work: We will reflect on, share, evaluate, and change to improve our instruction in order to increase our impact so ALL students can learn and grow.

Grammatically, they're not pretty. They don't provide a lot of details of how, which was not a requirement. But I think the teachers are on the right path. These statements signify their willingness to look at data and be transparent if they did well or need to do better. As teams, they'll identify how to support the students of teachers whose scores were not the best, at the same time helping that teacher learn and improve.

This requires a great deal of trust. This requires interdependently and teams of 13, 14, and 15 teachers working as one.

There is a poster in our staff lounge that reads:

You are not a TEAM

unless you have goals that

require you to work together,

collectively and interdependently

to achieve them. 

You MUST NEED EACH OTHER

to be a team. 

This is our definition of excellence.