4 conditions for successful school leadership

1) Culture
2) Mindset
3) Skills
4) Strategies

School Culture

In schools, we must create strong cultures with a defined autonomy.  We should know who makes decisions and how those decisions are made.  As often as possible, that should include a lot of people in the decision.  People thrive when they understand their role, their purpose, and how they impact the whole school team.

Teacher Mindset --> Skills

Once teachers are in a culture where they believe that they, and their colleagues, can make an impact on student learning, then the growth mindset flourishes. As that happens, they spend more time learning and improving their craft.

Skills --> Instructional Strategies

As skills grow, so does personal confidence. Teachers look to increase their instructional toolbelt. They dig deeper, learning about new instructional strategies.

Practice Leads to improved Skills and Strategies

Educators put in more time and energy into their work when they know the things they are doing matter. They will begin to work with more passion, work smarter, and grow as a result

Putting it together

When a culture is toxic it really doesn’t matter how skilled the educators are or how good the strategies are. Build culture first and individual mindsets will follow. Mindsets matter, we must believe that what we do makes an impact.  If I believe that no matter how hard I work, our students aren't going to be very good, what reason do I have to put in the extra work? We can’t build our skills if we aren’t putting in the time to improve.  If we haven't invested in building our skills and strategies, instruction suffers and students lose.

A Delicate Balance: Retakes and Responsibility

I recently heard a conversation between two parents of Middle School students.  They were discussing that their children are allowed to do retakes.  They were concerned that their children were not learning responsibility.  In the conversation, they pointed out that in their jobs, they were not allowed to be late or have retakes.

Their concern is valid, responsibility is a key trait any employer is going to want.  While most jobs don't fire you for one mistake, the overall point can still be made that responsibility is equal to many academic skills students obtain in school.

It is critical to understand a key difference between learning and the workplace. In the workplace, the objectives vary based on the type of work being done.  Often the objective may be customer service and therefore timeliness is critical. However, in school, the objective is going to be learning the content standard or learning goal.  Therefore, we must be precise in our assessment.  Lumping responsibility and content knowledge into the same assessment can make the results messy.  Using Kindergarten as an example, let's say we have a learning goal that students must count to ten.  If a student is unable to count to 10 but can count to 3, we don't simply grade the student with a 30%, reprimand the student for not being a responsible learner, and then move on to the next standard of counting by twos.  Counting to ten is a building block in the student's learning.  Therefore, we continue to practice until we can get to ten.

Using the Kindergarten example is a simplistic way of looking at learning.  However, it is true of other learning as well.  In Middle School, it is critical that the learner takes responsibility for their work.  The student needs to show evidences of learning between the first attempt at the assessment and the second attempt.  This means additional, meaningful, work.  If a course has 9 essential learnings in an 18 week semester, clearly they are going to be having several assessments.  It is in the student's best interest to do their best to perform at the highest level on the first attempt of learning.  However, if they simply struggle to "get it," we would be doing the student a disservice by saying "as a school district, we determined this to be an essential part of your education, but since you didn't understand it on October 14th, we will simply no longer hold you accountable for it."  Instead, we insist on learning and we expect that the responsibility of that learning falls on the student with support from the teacher. Both academic content and responsibility are of primary concern but assessed separately.

Bringing People Closer through Language Learning

Learning a language has many benefits, has opened up my world, and has been one of my greatest learning challenges as an adult.  Learning a language doesn't happen overnight. I have learned many "side lessons" in this process.  I am focusing on one such side lesson of my language learning experience today: bringing people closer.

My son and I are learning Spanish at the same time. Using the internet for language learning has introduced us to new people.    Our teachers are from Puebla Mexico and Caracas Venezuela. In the past, we have also had teachers from Ecuador, Cuernavaca Mexico, Columbia, and Guatemala (the last 3 listed are immigrants who currently live in Omaha, Nebraska and taught us in person.) We also are hosting an exchange student from Spain this year and she is always happy to us with our language skills.

Learning Spanish has allowed us to build relationships with people from all of the world, so when news comes on TV about riots in Venezuela, my son has already gotten pictures from his teacher showing the events happening in his neighborhood.  Real fear and concern exist in our house that otherwise would simply be another news story.  When we hear the horrible things said about Mexicans, we personally know a well educated, engineer, and polyglot who doesn't fit that stereotype at all.  We also know several others from Latin America who are bilingual and are contributing great things in our own local communities.

Learning a language continues to benefit my life and I will share many of these benefits with you over time.  One critical point I advocate, especially for people who do not live in ethnically diverse places, is to seek out people who are from another country.  Use learning another language as a way to connect with a new culture. Use the internet if needed (italki.com). It widens your world view and helps you connect to a different perspective you might otherwise miss in the comfort of your own life.

Empathy in Learning

Empathy cannot be a possible side effect of our teaching, it must be intricately planned into our lessons to make sure that students have deep "understandings" that will matter in their lives forever.

Perspective and empathy are two ways students learn. Perspective is looking over someone's shoulder and seeing something from their angle.  Empathy is being in their shoes.  Gaining perspective is critically important. Realizing that others see things different can help us realize there are multiple points of view and possibly (and almost always) more than one right answer.  Empathy requires a deeper view.  When you learn using empathy, you understanding feelings.  Empathy is very challenging, for example, how can a person who has been rich their entire life understand what it means to be truly poor? To create lessons which develop this empathy, one must use more than mere fact recall.  Instead, lessons have to be designed carefully.  It requires simulations and role-playing.  Even then, it is easy to fall short.  It takes many iterations using reflection, writings, conversations, and prompts.

Concepts like race are very difficult to develop a deep, empathetic understanding because it is impossible to actually live in another person's shoes. However, to have a meaningful race discussion, empathy has to be planned.  I can never know, specifically, which things in my life have come through white privilege and which have been earned solely on the merits of my hard work.  Structuring thought around deep questions can be scary.  It is easier for me, as a teacher, to teach the Civil Rights Movement through the memorization of facts such as dates and names of historical figures. It becomes slightly more difficult to create lessons to encourage a student to look at a different point of view. However, the breakthrough for students will be much more powerful when the lessons go to the next step of incorporating empathy. Exploring big questions like "what role has race played in my own life," leads to more meaningful and deep understanding.  Avoiding the deep thoughts only delays the debates or allows students to avoid ever grappling with these issues.  Not having these debates while in the safe confines of your classroom is a disservice to students.

Stop Learning Children, It's Time To Go Back To School

At the end of Christmas break, my son, a Freshman in High School, said something profound.  He told me that he was "sad that school's starting because learning's going to stop now."  Ouch! As an educator, that one stings. But, I immediately knew there was something to this.  I knew generally what he was talking about because he had been putting together some spreadsheets and spending a lot of time on iTalki taking Spanish lessons with one teacher from Mexico and another from Venezuela during his Christmas break.

Now a month later, I asked him a couple follow up questions about this.

1) What did you mean when you said now that school is starting, learning has to stop.  What is "school" and what is "learning?"

His answer:

• School is learning about stuff other people want you to learn.
• Learning is about what you want to learn and what you like.

2) Do you think "school" has value?

Yes, school is important when you are learning to think critically.

3) So, what specifically is not valuable about school?

Just memorizing stuff. Like I had to memorize the spelling of a word or chemicals on the periodic table but I don't remember that later.  When they talk about what the periodic table means and how to use it, that is useful.

Short-term memorization has the least value.  If they tell you, "we are having a quiz in two days," and I have to memorize for it, I'm not going to remember that stuff.

If you have to know things in order to do other things, then "school" is important.  In Spanish class, if I learn a word for a test, it doesn't stick, however, if I have to remember it for a story or a conversation, it is more useful and I'm going to remember it.

My Takeaway

Facts are not learning and kids see right through it when we try to have them memorize seemingly unconnected discrete facts. Connecting facts in a way that allows for the transfer of facts into "understandings" (as defined by Wiggin and McTighe in their 2005 book "Understanding By Design") is the essence of what education is supposed to be.  Designing our schools, and the classes inside those schools, around bigger questions that transfer into other content areas, and into life, will lead to better student engagement and deeper understandings that matter to our students.

The Problem with Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers

Let me start by stating, you can use Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teacher with effectiveness. The trick is to use activities from these sources with designed purpose.  It is easy to look at the activities provided on Teachers Pay Teachers and simply adopt them. However, teaching is much more than activities so it is critical to teach using a mindful approach to instruction.

As with any good instruction, we must go through a process.
1. Establish goals and essential questions.
2. Design assessments that are connected to these goals.
3. Set up activities that adequately prepare students for the assessment and for transferring knowledge to other areas of life.

The problem with finding a topic and running to a resource someone else has created is it may not meet the established goal.  The critical first step in lesson design is establishing a goal and knowing what essential questions need to be pondered.  Activities should only be designed after a deep dive into "what are the goals" and "what evidences can be used to prove students have a deep understanding of these goals."  I understand the interest in having a prepackaged lesson handed over to you.  However, the real power in teaching is connecting the activities directly to the goals.

Take a much deeper look at lesson design in "Understanding by Design" by Wiggins and McTighe (2005)

Meet Students Where They Are

Students need teachers to care about them as individuals.  Each child comes into school with a unique story.  Behaviors often come from a deeper problem.  These behaviors manifest themselves in a way that is difficult to deal with while trying to teach a classroom full of children.  Some people believe that to be fair, all students should all be treated the same.  They believe that if a student acts poorly, something should be done with no consideration of what is going on in the life of the student.  Others see a student with disadvantages and then lower expectations in subtle but devastating ways.  Kids need to be loved for who they are, even when they are at their worst.  All students deserve to have teachers who have high expectations of them.  As educators, we don't get to decide where a student starts, but we can help impact where they end up.

Statement #1: Students don't deserve to get extra attention just because they act bad

What they have right: Dealing with behavior is a balancing act.  You can, at times, unintentionally reinforce negative behaviors.

However, if you want behaviors to change, you have to change your behavior and then reflect on your impact.  If you hope to just ride it out the bad behavior, the behaviors will likely not change.  If the child is seeking attention and they get the most attention when they act poorly, you are reinforcing the poor behavior.  Each individual student has separate needs.  Giving a student specific positive feedback when their behaviors are positive can be very effective.

Statement #2: Don't have fun with them when they are misbehaving

What they have right: If a student is getting positive reinforcement for misbehaving, expect the behaviors to go up.

However, if a 6-year-old child needs a moment to breathe or they need to reset their emotions, it can be very helpful to allow them that time.  Once they are able to think more clearly, then it is time to get into consequences.  Time to clam down isn’t “fun time,” it is sometimes needed to address the behavior.

Statement #3: Stop being easy on Kids-Punish bad behaviors

What they have right: expectations should be high for all kids

However, the end consequence should connect with the behavior and should fit the individual if it is going to be effective.  If a basketball team misses a lot of layups, having the kids run as a consequence will have no impact on their behavior (unless of course, they were missing the layups on purpose).  If the players are missing layups, practice layups.  Make the consequences fit the action.  All behaviors have consequences.  If you study hard, you get better grades than you would have otherwise gotten.  That is a consequence.  Consequences that connect the behavior to the action make a much more significant impact.

Build Relationships 

What works in the short term doesn't always work in the long term.  While yelling will get an immediate reaction, building a trusting relationship will pay bigger dividends over the course of the school year.

All students deserve adults in their lives who will see their potential and take the time to find out how to get them to the high expectations set for all students.