Celebrate Monday's: Look How This Charter School Teaches and Celebrates Its Core Values

Hey school leader,

Thank you for being such a valued member of our school leadership community.

I believe culture is the sum of all of the behaviors by the human beings in the organization.

The best way to ensure the behaviors by the humans are focused on the right things are to adopt agreed upon values.

These values cannot just be word on paper. They need to be discussed and defined. They need training and to be communicated daily through the actions of the leaders.  

If the values are not followed it's everyone in the organization's job to say so. Not just the person at the top of the organization. 

This why I loved visiting Pine Lake Prep as part of our Teacher Leader Consortium this past week. The staff, students and stakeholders spent an incredible amount of time working through an adoption process of their core values. 

Setting and changing the culture of a school might be the most important job of a leader as it doesn't matter how strong your plans for success are. Culture eats vision and plans for breakfast! My team works on building values through team work exercises during our retreats and strategic planning programs. 

There wasn't a hallway that we walked down that didn't have evidences of the core values being communicated and demonstrated through student work (see pictures below), student programs and adult behavior. 

Below are integrity and empathy drawings by the first graders. 

If you are on Facebook join our School Leadership Community to see the rest of the pictures. Click here

I believe if you want to be more you have to see more!

Teachers from multiple charter schools toured the campus for the day and learned about their student driven and managed robotics program. High school students learn to run a business (Team Spork) create a marketing strategy and raise funds to lead the program. You can find more information about Team Spork here: http://teamspork.com/wp/sponsors/sponsor-us/




The entire STEM vision came together with the addition of a aquaponics program. A small investment by the school has created dozens of school wide learning and career opportunities from farming to culinary school!


The school has adopted a Spanish Immersion platform to teach most content, starting in kindergarten. The program is in year four and beginning to see incredible benefits. The high school student council runs multiple programs to not only mentor and teach their own students, but serve the local community. 

These were just a few of the highlights from a jam packed day. 

The best part was, Executive Director Andrew Moceri noted that every new program in the school was basically "borrowed" from another high performing school they visited. 

Pine Lake Prep has been one of the top public schools in the Charlotte area for over a decade, but it continues to evolve and grow to serve its community at a high level today by adding key school improvement initiatives such STEM, multi-language immersion, CAPSTONE and dozens of Advanced Placement courses. Executive Director Moceri noted the "sphere of influence" is growing here at Pine Lake. We are not just looking at preparing kids for college, we are preparing them to make a greater impact globally over the next 20 to 50 years!

A huge thank you to Andrew and his team for opening their doors to us. 

Teacher Leader Consortium

Our Teacher Leader Consortium (TLC) is probably our most important and critical leadership program we facilitate. The TLC provides an opportunity for the best teachers in your school visit the best schools across the state, learn to lead at a higher level and improve the culture, strategy and decision making at their school. 

This Thursday we will be visiting The Expedition School in Hillsborough, a K-8 experiential learning charter school that’s impact is significant! We have a few seats left. Email me for details or click the link below. 

https://www.leaders-building-leaders.com/teacher-leader-consortium

Happy Monday!