Fife Public Schools » Superintendent

District Walkthroughs

Elaine Smith — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:28:32 +0000

Several times a year, Dr. McCammon invites district leaders to “walk through” each of our six buildings looking for evidence of high quality student work. Each walk through begins with a conversation with that building’s principal, Dr. McCammon, and the other leaders who will be touring the school. The team then walks through the halls of the school examining the work posted along with the description of the work the teacher has posted. This description, Walls That Teach, appears alongside the work so that viewers can understand the key concepts for learning, the design of the work, and how students felt about doing that work. The walkthrough then ends with a debrief, led by Dr. McCammon, about what was seen and learned.

Here our a few pictures from the first walkthroughs conducted this year:

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Follow Dr. McCammon on Twitter!

Elaine Smith — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:59:47 +0000

Dr. McCammon has embarked on a new way of communicating district news through the eyes of the superintendent. He has joined the world of Twitter. To receive his updates, simply follow this link and sign up to follow his Twitter feed. You can either follow his tweets (individual posts) via your computer or by receiving text messages via your cell phone. We invite you to join in the fun!

District Walkthroughs

Elaine Smith — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:53:24 +0000

District leaders conduct walkthroughs through our six buildings several times a year. This provides leadership with an opportunity to see the great work happening in all of our schools, is an authentic professional development opportunity, and provides conversations around how to continue to build capacity for teachers and students to continue their great work. Get a glimpse of one of these opportunities by watching the video highlighting a recent walkthrough of Discovery Primary School.

Dr. McCammon Speaks to Local Chamber of Commerce

Elaine Smith — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:56:20 +0000

Dr. Steve McCammon, Superintendent of Fife Public Schools was the guest speaker at the Fife Chamber of Commerce Luncheon on Wednesday, September 3 at the Fife Community Center. He was accompanied by current school board member Mr. Bruce Burnside and former school board member of 18 years Mr. Ron Larson. Mr. Larson is continuing to support the school district as a community navigator for the important local as well as national work of the school district. There were over thirty community and business leaders in attendance.

Dr. McCammon’s presentation was entitled, “Walking the Talk Toward Engaging Every Student”. His focus was upon the fact the even though the district graduated over 99% of all of its seniors last year at or above standard, it still is working on areas of concern in the learning of every child and made the case for why Fife School District is nationally recognized for the system of trust and collaboration that has been built among teachers, administrators, community, students and parents. He also talked about the changing demographics in our district. While the district is pleased with the growing amount of diversity in the district it does present a challenge as we have gone from 5% of our students at Discovery Primary that speak English as a second language six years ago to over 30% today.

He further encouraged the audience to check out the district website for more information on the districts efforts as well as mentioning what great information can be obtained by reading the national case study about Fife entitled “Changing the Quality of Student Experiences: The Fife Way”. This is the type of information the superintendent shares about our school district in those cases where he is invited to speak many times during the year at national conferences and in other school districts about the eight year process that our district has been about.

At the conclusion of the meeting the realtors in attendance were especially complimentary that Fife Schools have a great reputation and that this information will be great to share with prospective home buyers who are already actively pursuing a home in the district greatly due to the quality of our schools.

Cisco Systems Case Study

Elaine Smith — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:12:36 +0000

I spent a few days recently in San Jose, California at the Cisco Systems campus participating in a new National Superintendents Leadership Network which comes out of a newly created partnership between the Schlechty Center and Cisco Systems. Cisco Systems, one of the largest global companies located in the Silicon Valley became involved with the center after they (Cisco) donated $40 million to help rebuild many Katrina ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana schools. Their approach was to ensure that as the schools were rebuilt through their 21st Century Schools Initiative, they were built around a quality systems approach such as ours. This led to them selecting the Standard Bearer and consequently the Schlechty approach as a model and an organization to partner with. They (Cisco) are in the process of writing (and documenting within) a white paper (a series of case studies) about quality systems change and how focusing on engagement throughout the system impacts students and changes pedagogy in education. After hearing what we have been about for the past eight years and in reading the center’s case study about us, they requested a visit and some interview time with some of our folks. The visit was led by Dr. Peg Maddocks, the Director of the 21st Century Schools Initiative in Cisco’s Global Education Services Division. She brought with her a contract writer hired by Cisco to capture their experiences in the “White Paper”. This will be similar to the visit by the Video Journal of Education team and the visit by Lennie Hay that resulted in the case study entitled: Changing the Quality of Student Experiences: The Fife Way. They will be meeting with a number of staff from around the district. They will also be getting out into some of the schools as well as they want to see firsthand the “Walls That Teach” , the student work as well as the overall climate of our buildings and to meet as many staff as possible. This should be another great opportunity for us to do some quality self reflection about the work that we have going on around here and for it to be recognized by a top ten Fortune 500 company is something that I think we can all be proud of once again.

Thanks again,
Steve

Dr. Steve McCammon

Superintendent

Click here to view Dr. McCammon participate in a Cisco Systems National Talk Show Panel entitled; “What Have We Learned About Learning From Business?”