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

Make a Smilebox slideshow

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 and I continue to work with the Schlechty Center traveling to national conferences and assisting in school district trainings.  These trips not only provide us with experiences that we bring back to Fife – our district is paid for our time every time we travel.  This provides revenue of over $85,000 to further our work of providing time for teachers to design work around the concepts our students find difficult to learn.

• Dr. McCammon was asked to submit a new article for a soon-to-be-released global website called GETideas.org.  This new website, sponsored by Cisco, is designed for superintendents and other educational leaders around the nation to share what works in the field. Our district work was selected as the initial focus of the site! In his article, Dr. McCammon was able to share the great work of our staff and students.

• Dr. McCammon recently spent “virtual” time with a district in New Orleans.  Using the same video conferencing equipment many of our fourth grade students have used for the “Where in Washington?” project, he was able to communicate with over 40 of their district leaders and teaching staff.  His sharing of our work, helped to shape their thinking, and as their superintendent shared later, “We might not do it exactly the Fife way, but it will use the same strategies to make our work happen here.”  We are really excited about the possibilities of using this virtual experience to conduct more conversations with other districts across the country; not only sharing our experiences, but learning from theirs as well.

As always – proud to be a part of the Fife team!
Elaine Smith
Working on the Work Coordinator

We invite you to view each of our school plans at http://www.fifeschools.com/schools/SIPs/index.html.

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.

Please leave a comment here for these young artists and their teacher!