MainThing

The late Stephen Covey is oft quoted as saying, "The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing."  Truly, in that sentence he captured the essence of focus (or lack thereof), both in personal and organizational life.

In the school I currently serve (Guthrie Common School District in Guthrie, Texas) we have spent the last three years developing and striving toward our fundamental goal for our students, which we call the Guthrie Graduate Profile (GGP).  We attempt to embed within the fabric of our daily work a persistent, underlying drumbeat of developing the whole child, refusing to let our work and school be centered only on academic content.

Aligned to that singular pursuit, our practice has been to dedicate two or three days per year in which we assemble as a whole school, students of all grade levels and all the instructional staff, to turn our attention fully to that GGP.  Today was one of those days in which we focused our collective attention on the GGP as we considered, examined, discussed, and digested the GGP through a wide range of learning tasks and through multiple lenses.

That process was and is our attempt to keep our attention on what we believe is the main thing - the GGP.

Covey was right:  The main thing really is to keep the Main Thing the MAIN THING,