On Monday I spent my first day at a district training in my new school district. It was the administrative “retreat” and as always, there was a plethora of information being tossed my way regarding district initiatives, policies, and procedures. Since it was all new to me, I left at 3pm with that feeling of information overload that we all get when starting a new position.

The meeting was held in the district board room and, despite being relegated for 7 hours to the upright, boardroom chairs designed to keep meetings short and to-the-point, I survived the day and am still really excited for the start of the school year.

After a day of listening and observing, here are a few of my reflections on the day:

• The phrase, “On the bus…” has got to go. It’s the new way of saying, “buy in,” which is another phrase that has been sucked completely dry of meaning by overuse.
• Regarding “buy in,” I am sensing administrators at all levels beginning to move away from the feeling that people have to be 100% “bought in” to everything we do at the school. Before you take issue with that statement, realize that I’m not talking about forcing initiatives down people’s throats and telling them to deal with it “or else.” Take our district’s new literacy curriculum as an example. It’s been pored over for years by teachers, administrators, literacy coaches, and other experts. It’s solid and it’s been built from the bottom up with input from those who will be doing the work. How, then, can we be expected to wait around for all of the teachers in the building to “buy in” before implementing the program in our building? As Doug Reeves suggests in The Leader’s Guide to Standards, the notion of “buy in” has been placed on such a pedestal that it often becomes a barrier to getting down to the work at hand. “If people need to be motivated to do what is right, then you have the wrong people in the wrong positions” (p. 159).
• The word “accountability” can be a bit threatening. To make headway with our school effectiveness plan, it will be important to shift the focus from accountability to responsibility. Along the way, we’ll need to motivate teachers accustomed to working in solitude to come together and collaborate to do what’s best for kids.

Moving to a new school in a new district always presents a unique opportunity to see just how different the perceived needs of the community are even as little as 20 miles away. I’m sure as I get more knowledgeable about the culture and initiatives here I will be posting more about how our new initiative(s) are received by the faculty. For now, it was important to me just to do a brain dump of some of the things that have been on my mind since yesterday.

Image: “hose02” by Potatojunkie

My GTD in Education post continues to be one of the most popular on the blog so I’ve “promoted” it to the menu bar up top.

Also, if you’ve arrived here looking for the other resources I had posted on del.icio.us and posting pictures on your blog or wiki, they’ve been moved over to my wiki for easy reference.

I realize this broke some links, but as the GTD post continues to gain popularity, I’m trying to simplify things on the site.

Image: “Construction Work” by gullevek

This is going to seem kind of offbeat, but it’s been on my mind recently. I’ve been meaning to get this off my chest for a while now but I didn’t know if you would still accept me.

I was a slacker in high school. Well – that may be a little unfair. Perhaps “underachiever” would be a better word. I always took honors and AP classes, I was always respectful to my teachers and administrators, and I was very involved in extra-curricular activities. In terms of my academics, however, I was very comfortably “above average.”

Truth be told, I’m pretty sure that had I really applied myself, I could have been at or near the top of my class. But for some reason, I was content to turn in half of my homework, skip the whole “studying” thing, and exert the minimum amount of effort required to earn a “B” in class (C’s were verboten in my house growing up). This must have irritated my mother to no end (she’s a teacher!), but to her credit, aside from the “No C’s” thing, she pretty much stayed off my case about it.

I’m not proud of this at all. In fact, I’m actually a little embarrassed. As karmic payback, I ended up teaching at the school where I graduated and had to work with some of the teachers whose classes I coasted through. While I’m sure they barely even remembered my middling performance in their classes, I could never quite shake the feeling that some of them would look at me and think, “This guy was the biggest underachiever I ever had – and now he’s a teacher?”

I’ve been obsessing a bit about this lately as my son recently turned three. He’ll be starting preschool in August and I’ve been reflecting a lot on my slackerness trying to determine when it actually started, what (if anything) contributed to it, and how to keep my son from doing the same things.

I’m sure I’m being a little melodramatic here. I mean, I got into the colleges I wanted to attend, and even scored a Florida Undergraduate Scholarship, but something has always bugged me about why I was never motivated to “give it my all” in class.

I don’t blame my parents for not caring, my teachers for not having better lessons, my friends for being “bad influences,” or anyone else for that matter. But to this day, I wonder what it would have taken for me to stop being so lazy in high school.

If there’s a silver lining (or, at the very least, a point) to all of this it’s that I seem to have turned out OK. I’m a high school administrator with a wonderful family. If nothing else, all of my slackerness has given me a unique lens through which to view student apathy and school reform.

Photo: “Windsurfing Upriver” by bigdadventures.

Regular Universe readers know that I’m always looking for opportunities to increase my personal productivity. As such, I’m a big fan of Merlin Mann’s 43Folders blog. One of the best series of posts on 43F is the Inbox Zero series from a year or so ago. Most of us deal with tons of email on a daily basis, and before adopting some of the strategies Merlin outlines in his series of articles, I would routinely have hundreds of emails in my inbox. Now, I’m usually down to around 5 or 6 at any one time.

I’m not going to rehash it here, but if you haven’t read the series of articles go do it right now. Once you’ve done that, check out this video of a talk Merlin presented at the Google campus on July 23rd.

Imagine how much more time we could spend in classrooms if we could handle our email more efficiently.

I’m going to date myself now, but the fall of 1990 marked the start of my sophomore year of high school and the opening of a new high school in my district which I was fortunate to attend. The school, built on a reclaimed chunk of the Everglades, was ironically named Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after a woman who spent most of her 108 years of life fighting to preserve the river of grass.

As the school had no senior class its first year, in just one summer I’d gone from a freshman at the bottom of the pecking order to second-in-seniority status. Only band geeks current and former will appreciate this, but I have the honor of having my name enshrined forever (scroll waaaaaaay down…) as the first drum major of the Marching Eagles.

So at the age of 15 I was placed in a position of “authority” over my peers, some of whom were older than I was. Who was I to tell them to stand at attention, or let them know that the bells of their instruments weren’t polished enough? When I think about leadership, and the challenges of becoming an administrator at age 29, I often smile at how some of the lessons I learned as a student leader carry over into my professional life.

• Use a lot of “we.” Minimize “you.” It gives people the sense that you’re in it with them.
• Push ups are not an effective motivator.
• Even if you think you know the answer, ask people what they think. “Hey – from where you’re standing, does this line look straight?”
• Once you pull rank on someone, you’ve changed the dynamic of the relationship for good.
• The people doing the real work can lose their motivation after a long, hard practice because they can’t see how their small part fits into the big picture. But show them the video from atop the press box and they suddenly realize how all the small parts fit together.
• You can stand on the podium conducting all afternoon, but if the guys in the drum line — the ones who keep the pulse for the entire group — don’t trust you, you’re just a guy in a funny looking costume flapping his arms.
• Laugh at yourself often and admit when you screw up.
• You can only be the best when everyone — everyone — stays in step and hits their mark on time.
• Everyone may not be doing exactly the same thing — some are marking time, some are marching double-time — but everything contributes to the formation.
• Trust is everything. Sometimes you have to march backwards and you can’t see where you’re going.

If nothing else, I think being a student leader gave me some great experience and taught me that it is much more important to have power with people rather than power over people. And heading back to work this week and seeing the band practicing in the triple-digit heat made me think of my own high school experience.

Images:
“Blue Devils at 2005 DCI World Championships” by Scutter
“DSC_1425” by traveller2020