There is nothing like ending the school year on a high. My friend and colleague Lisa Unger diligently spends time each year to collate the work that we’ve done that may seem invisible but all together looks outstanding!

How does Lisa make this annual report?  She began by returning to one of our guiding documents:  Leading Learning   As you will notice, the document is laid out like a giant rubric so that you can rank your own work on how well you’re doing.  When our new principal began last year, I went through each of the look-fors and told him where I thought we were at and what work needed to still be accomplished.  The first slide of the slideshow shows a tag cloud that Lisa created based on the primary ideas that drive our LLC goals.

Lisa then harvested any tweet from our Library Learning Commons Twitter account @ODSSLLC, combined that with our annual goals, and tried to showcase what we do.  Once you’ve collated your evidence of your impact on student success, all you need it to have its desired effect is some uninterrupted time with your principal.  Our principal gave us 45 minutes and lots of positive feedback for us.  As Lisa showed off the slideshow and talked about the goals of each event and its success, I took notes on what our principal’s ideas were.  I may have interjected once or twice in my enthusiasm for how well this was all going.  Of course as we were talking, we also realized how much invisible work there is that we didn’t take pictures of including our smorgasbord-style staff meeting where we had 12 concurrent sessions on improving staff and student well-being and relationships.

Thanks to the success of our annual library report in conversation with our new principal, we have put a bow on the end of the year and more importantly, we’ve reflected together on what we’ll take forward into the next school year.