Student Belonging: A Principal of the Year's Plan

-

When a principal and her school achieve amazing results, I find one thing stands out: the focus on helping students belong and grow. Student belonging is the first thing Sonia Ruiz builds. She is the 2026 National Middle Level Principal of the Year in the US. Incredibly but not surprisingly, her school's English learners and students with IEPs are making gains.

Sonia says she didn't feel like school was built for her, but now she leads Jane Addams Middle School in Bolingbrook, Illinois. The school has earned the state's Exemplary status three years in a row. For her, love and high expectations go together.

In this episode, you'll learn:

  • The two survey questions that get middle schoolers to tell adults what they really need
  • What a school dance looks like when not every student likes noise
  • The three questions Sonia's staff asks before any decision
  • How a chronically absent sixth grader finished eighth grade mentoring younger students
  • Why Sonia uses a rubric to evaluate changes so change doesn't feel personal
  • The one small thing students say makes them feel they belong
  • What Sonia wishes adults outside school understood about middle schoolers

Show notes, the full transcript, and the research behind this episode: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e1006


Check out this episode!

Popular posts from this blog

122 For You: Cool Cat Teacher's Favorite Apps, Software, and Sites

-
Image
These are my favorite apps, software, and sites for managing my life, home, classroom, and more.  Hope you enjoy and hope you share yours in the comments. Calendaring 1. Google Calendar Google Calendar is now and has been my calendar of choice for about a year and a half. I have a personal calendar for me that is set up to send me a text message at certain times before I have to be somewhere because I always forget what time it is!  My family and each child has a calendar (I set the kids appointments to automatically show up on the family calendar), and I use Google cal for my classes .   Each class and major project such as netgened has a calendar and I embed these calendars in all of the Nings, blogs, and wikis as needed to keep people apprised of what is happening. I print these calendars out for my classes and for the refrigerator! The greatest addition to the calendar is that now I keep my 5 most important calendars on my Apple iPod touch 16 GB (2nd Gene...
Read more

RSS your family: Rapidly Synchronize Sanity

-
Image
OK. The verdict is in, my husband and I both rate the Airset calendaring service a 10! We have used its powerful features and RSS to Rapidly Synchronize our Sanity ! Everyone loves it, from the 9 year old to the 39 year old! We have three children, ourselves, a plethora of community activities, and an extended family to keep up with. I was updating calendars and reprinting them every second and they were still outdated. Three weeks a go, I'd had it! My sitter is moving to greener (or saner) pastures and I was so overwhelmed! I spent about three hours researching family planning tools and looked at Trumba , Remember the Milk , 30 boxes , MyHomePoint , and Airset . I tried and set up calendars in a few. Here is what got me excited about Airset: RSS feeds - All of them have this ability. I have my children starting up on a simple Google start up page which shows them their g-mail account and blogs of note (some I write just for them). Using RSS, my children now see their ...
Read more

Save time Webmaster! Use RSS feeds

-
I have been learning about the various tools to get the load off of me as webmaster of our school website . Recently, I attended a class on Macromedia Contribute and I was impressed. However, I dreaded the installation, training, and other work that always comes with software. Then, I stumbled upon several websites that have made it easy to keep the school website updated -- with only my limited involvement. These use a relatively new technology called RSS feeds . They are: RSS Calendar - www.rsscalendar.com -- The front office staff, always looking for ways to improve things, updates the calendar. We used categories so that news feed readers can subscribe to just the calendars they need. Check out our website at www.westwoodschools.org -- the calendar on the right and on the calendar pages comes directly from the online calendar. And when I say fast - I mean fast -- it updates immediately! That is two hours off my plate a week! Flickr - www.flickr.com -- I am using this to a...
Read more