After attending the Ron Clark Academy, my colleagues and I were privileged to share what we learned and what we can implement in the classroom and school community. I attended RCA in Sept. 2016 with some blog and instagram friends, which was AMAZING!! However, going with teachers and our principal will make the biggest impact at our school. The excitement spreads faster and with greater impact when there is a cluster of teachers on board with this revolution in our school system.
We had great discussion on changes to make in our classrooms and how best to begin the house system at our school. We planned out our professional development day that we would do about RCA while on our trip and wanted it to be completely inspirational like the trip to RCA. So of course we had to do a Harry Potter themed professional development. Here is how it went down...
We met in the library to give instruction to our Harry Potter themed "escape room." We started with a short clip from Harry Potter when Hermione was showing Ron how to do the Wingardium levioso wand flick.
This was our launch of how we learn best from peers and by doing. So the staff was divided into the 6 house teams and were given a spell-book that told them where to go. There were 3 stations they had to go to, to get a number that would unlock a lock on a suitcase.
One station was the quidditch room. The house had to work together to solve a giant Sudoku puzzle. Numbers were highlighted that gave a room number in the building that had a golden snitch with a number on it in the classroom door window. We even had these amazing quidditch goals my colleague's husband made.
This station was to represent rigor, because those puzzles can be tricky and working with others to solve them can even be more challenging.
The next station was the Ollivander's Wand shop.
At this shop, the houses would read the clues on wands to discover who the magical teacher at the school the wand belongs too. I made wands with chopsticks and hot glue. You can find tutorials for this on youtube.
When they figured out who the wand belonged to, they would find the name in the staff pictures. I highlighted a letter in their name that when they unscrambled all the highlighted letters, they would spell out another number. This station represented culture and the relationships we have within the school.
The last station was the potions class. I set this up in the teacher lounge. The house teams had to follow their house recipe for their potion to reveal their number. I made baking soda balls with a plastic number button inside and would use colored vinegar to dissolve the baking soda.
This station represented engagement as it created excitement to see the baking soda and vinegar react to each other to magically reveal their number.
Once the teams had all three numbers, they could go back to the library get their house team suitcase and unlock the magical words.
We had the words culture, engagement and rigor inside the suitcase and they had to unscramble the words to create their anchor chart for the remainder of the professional development presentation.
If the houses were able to unlock and unscramble those magical words, they were able to pick something off the trolley.
The staff was engaged and it could not have gone any better. As we presented what we learned, the house teams wrote questions and key points that stuck with them on their anchor chart.
We had many questions and discussion about what we can do at our school and in our houses. We have a lot of work to do but our school is invested in what is best for our school and students. I can not wait to see how we grow and change to be even better for our community. House teams also had fun with the Harry Potter Props/Photo Booth.
We had a local business (BIG O-Thank You) provide lunch for our professional development after we finished our presentation.
We ate with our houses and the discussion continued which was a great indicator that our school is ready for this revolution.
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