Setting the Direction of Travel

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

As we embark on our second week of school, our committees will begin their work for the year. I know that to some, this may seem like a tedious "extra duty as assigned", but from a building leaderships standpoint, these opportunities to sit down and strategize with my teacher leaders is critical to our overall success. It is by design that I scheduled the first meeting to be with the Faculty Leadership Team. I look forward to sitting down with this group of teachers to discuss our direction of travel for this school year. 

As I've said before, I tend to relate most things to either the military or sports. In this case, I'm going military. When conducting land navigation exercises, there are times when you need to look backward to determine your location, but from there, the only objective is to keep moving forward. In dense and rugged terrain (the terrain of public education in Illinois is certainly dense and rugged), this can be difficult when traversing long distances. If you try to focus on the final destination, you will get hopelessly lost. The key is to use your compass to point at an easily visible landmark (a tree, a hilltop, etc.) and then concentrate on getting to that location. From there, you just continue to move from landmark to landmark as you slowly make your way in a straight line to the final destination. That is my goal for this year. I want to work with my teachers to figure out where we want to end up in May and then focus on short-term waypoints that will get us there in the most direct route possible.