C4T #4 Summary

My first C4T for this month was to Mr. Bernia. He is a Principal at Oakview Middle School. Both posts I read from Mr. Bernia were very impressive. The first post I read was 1 thing we can do. Mr. Bernia discusses what else he can do beyond building relationships with staff, students, and parents. He spoke about the term innovation and the different meanings of it in his post. Mr. Bernia says that innovating should be looking at data, finding the gaps, and finding ways to fix and address them. He says that, “Strong relationships build the trust that serves as the “shell” for real conversations about meaningful data to occur, which will show the gaps for teachers to address with their innovations.” He says that as teachers, we should we doing this. He also posed a question in the end of his blog saying, “Do we collect high quality data, analyze it, and then innovate because of it?”

I commented back by introducing my self and I tried to answer his question with what I thought. I think that teachers do innovate because of the data analyzed. Teachers gather data from co-teachers, administrative staff, and their peers who have experience worth sharing. By sharing our experiences we are able to tweak them, make our ideas better, and address them in a better way.

The 2nd post I read from Mr. Bernia titled 15 days, was impressive and encouraging. He wrote a formal letter to all of his staff to set a positive tone for the last 15 days of school before their long break. He talks about their last 15 days being a marathon not a sprint and that the staff should still be pushing their students especially now since many students will want to slack off. He encourages the staff to push their students, care for them, and appreciate them.

I thought Mr. Bernia’s letter to his staff was great! I told him how I related to the letter since I was a college student and these last few weeks of school are draining and we just want to brush off these final exams to get them over with and be on break. I told him how I wished more professors would encourage us to still do our best before the semester is over rather than having to listen to them complain about how ready they are to be on break too. I thought his letter was a great reminder to his staff as to why they are in that profession and why every day at school counts.