by Darby Whitehair ‘12

Gregory meets with SGA representatives Alexandra Stephanos, Nicole Jakobowski and Samantha Cruz. photo by Paul Szewczyk ‘12

Where did the idea for the emphasis on “what we teach, how we teach, and purposeful reading, writing and speaking” spark from?

Last spring I started reading a book called Focus [“Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning by Michael Schmoker”] … he kept repeating over and over again that to help students succeed, we really don’t have to focus on this skill, that skill or focus on this test, that test. If we focus on a strong, rich curriculum, if we focus on engaging students in the class and if we focus on helping kids read, write and speak, those are the skills they need for life in the 21st century, not just in school but life beyond. If we focus on those, the other things fall into place.

If we focus on these three things then magic happens for students in the classroom and that is what we are all about—the magic that happens for the students in the classroom.

So we changed our school improvement plan and our school improvement plan is basically: we are going to improve student achievement by focusing on a strong, rich curriculum, engaging students in excellent lessons and working with students in terms of purposeful reading, writing and speaking.

As part of the focus on teaching, you plan for yourself, other administrators and resource teachers to observe teachers more regularly. What is the purpose of the observations?

If our challenge is focusing on “what we teach, how we teach and purposeful literacy skills, we need to be able to give people feedback. The purpose of going into a class … is to give feedback to a teacher on how something is working; so that we know what it is we need to focus on.

It’s like a teacher in a classroom; a teacher has an objective that students need to learn, the teacher needs to assess along the way if students are learning that objective because if not, a teacher has to take a different route to help students. As a principal I have to do the same thing. So the purpose of going in and seeing what is going on is to help steer the direction of the school.

What were the reasons last year’s attendance policy was not successful? What about this year’s attendance policy is going to make it better than last year’s and the old LC policy before that?

I didn’t see the issue that other schools saw until the end of the year … It was worse in other schools.

So what MCPS decided was that all high schools would change it. It wouldn’t be loss of credit because sometimes if students were at five unexcused absences by October they knew they lost credit …What changes is, we are focused on getting a student’s grade back instead of losing credit.

My goal is to get students here to learn. I don’t want to just do LC and have it be punitive and say I am done with the student. I’d rather put a contract together … If I just let a student LC, the message is I don’t care.

In your years as the principal of Sherwood, what have been your greatest achievements? What about disappointments in the past and aspirations for this school year?

I guess if I looked at greatest, I don’t know. I hope that it’s working with staff and students to make lives better for students when they leave Sherwood.

I think my biggest disappointment, and I am working on that, is being locked behind this door [his office] or outside of the building and not being in the classroom as often as I want to be.

I would love Newsweek magazine to say we are one of the top 500 schools again and move higher in the ranking … I’d love to see us get closer to our goal in our school improvement plan. I know it is work … It is a growth and so I want to see growth because I know that has benefits for students.