Category — Education

The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. - Ralph Nader

As a school leader, what have you done to cultivate teacher leadership in your building?

I don’t mean having your administrative intern handle all of your referrals this semester so that you have time for “more important things.”

How much have you invested in the teacher leaders in your school? Are you inviting them to share their practices — their successes and failures — with their colleagues? Are you encouraging others to listen to what they say? Are you listening?

Remember that not all leaders have titles.

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. — John Quincy Adams, 6th president (1767-1848)

Funny how a blog post I didn’t even mean to share has inspired me (and others, too!) to make a commitment to spend more time in the classroom.

Sure, 20 walk-throughs per week can seem like a lot, but here is where the math geek in me takes over. Even at ten minutes each, that’s 200 minutes per week. In a 5-day week, that’s 40 minutes per day. Less time than I usually spend answering emails that, arguably, are not as important as what’s going on in classrooms. Oh yeah, and this year I’m teaching a class, too. But I know that I can do it.

Besides, if I am not doing this job to spend time with teachers and students working on instruction, then why am I there at all?

If you’re a school-based administrator and would like to take up this challenge, let’s see your commitment in the comments and/or on your own blog (if you have one). No one will be pounding on your door if you fall off the wagon, but if you put your name in writing down below you’ll feel committed and supported. Like so many challenges, sometimes things are easier if you have others to keep you on track.

Since the math teachers around here appear to need some specific parameters, in my case a classroom visit shall be considered one of the 20 if and only if:

• I actually enter the classroom (window shopping does not count), and
• the time spent actually inside the classroom is at least 5 minutes (no “just passing through” visits).

I will also make an effort to connect informally with at least half of the teachers whom I see.

Funny thing, though - cheating on these is really only cheating yourself. It’s like lying about your diet by not counting the calories in that Snickers bar you inhaled. Sure you can look puzzled to your friends, family, and doctor about why you’re not losing weight, but you know why.

No good decision was ever made in a swivel chair.
— George S. Patton, Army general (1885-1945)

So here it is. I’m going to put it out there and be accountable to you.

Beginning with the first week of school, I will visit a minimum of 20 classrooms per week, not including formal observations. That’s roughly four classrooms per day. It sounds like a lot when you say it that way, but for a 5-10 minute walk-through, that’s only about 40 minutes per day maximum.

Why have I found it so hard to make this happen? I always start out strong, but things break down some time around Novemeber or December. I suppose I could make the typical excuse. After all, it’s easy to get bogged down pushing papers, checking email, and returning voicemails.

But that’s not really a good excuse, is it?

Ben Wildboer shows how he used some ideas he found online (including some from yours truly!) to upgrade a slide deck about basic Earth structure. His blog post includes an “Extreme Makeover” like before and after look at his entire slide deck.

Ben’s immediate observation distills everything I’ve been trying to convey as succinctly as I’ve seen it done:

There were several students that expressed regret at the demise of the bullet points. It’s easier for them to just copy down exactly what it says (of course it is, they don’t have to actually pay attention or comprehend to do that). How well they’ve been trained by their past experiences!

Ah yes. Undoing years of damage done by the ubiquitous bullet point. Challenging, to say the least. But definitely a battle worth fighting.

Go check out Ben’s slide decks. And the rest of his blog while you’re there. He’s off to a great start!!

[Cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

I’ll admit that when I registered for my classes for this term I was not looking forward to “Educational Policy Analysis” - a required “core” course for my graduate work. But if I’ve learned anything in the three classes I’ve attended it’s that I know next to nothing about the way policy gets put into place above the district level.

Combined with the fact that we’re in the midst of what looks to be a very interesting presidential election, and my lack of understanding of policy at the highest level is inexcusable. Policy, you see, affects us all even if we don’t see how or why. As public managers, we make policy on a daily basis through our actions or inactions in our buildings.

Even more apparent is the culture of distrust between policy makers at the highest levels and practitioners on the ground in the schools. At the top level is a lack of belief that educators are doing an adequate job of focusing resources on the “right” students. And at the grassroots level we are often content using rhetoric that makes us feel more comfortable that those at the top level could never understand what we do at the building level.

So if I’ve learned anything about policy, it’s that I don’t know enough and that there’s no excuse for not knowing. Policy making is not done in isolation — it’s a wide-open process that is accessible to anyone who wants to know more or to be more involved. Bridging the gap between practitioners and policy makers is one of the responsibilities that district- and building-level administrators must make a priority if we are to truly improve education. Becoming involved in the process will go a long way toward making us feel less like “victims” of policies that are “handed down” to us.

[Image by BoutrosBoutros]

Under the heading of “Where the heck have you been?” I can say 2008 has been off to a rough start with a pair of sick kiddos. For those keeping track, though, I’m hoping to get back into some regular posting soon as well as find time to record a new ep of the Practical Principals with Melinda.

For today, though, I am putting out there a couple of forms that we have been using at my school this year. Our district has no “standard” form for classroom observations of walk-throughs so we decided to create our own. We aligned the forms with specific school and district initiatives as you will see. But I hope that you will feel free to download them and tweak them for your particular situation.

I’m particularly proud of the walk-through instrument which I have pared down to a very manageable 3×5 size. I’ve seen some walk-through data-collection instruments that were multiple 8.5×11 pages long. In my mind, it’s not a walk-through if it takes me 15 minutes to navigate the form.

These are in 4-up format so I print a few on card stock, guillotine them down to size, and hold the stack together with a binder clip a la the Hipster PDA. I keep the stack in my pocket and try to hit a couple of classrooms right after class change since I’m already in the halls. When I’m finished, I am able to file them neatly in a 3×5 card holder for later reference when it comes time to write my narratives for teacher evals.

So here you go. Each .zip includes the original document created in Pages as well as a PDF and a Word file. Since I created them in Pages, it doesn’t always translate correctly to Word, but it’s close enough that you can tweak until your heart’s content.

• Classroom Observation Form
• Classroom Walk-Through Form

I hope that if you modify or tweak, you will share the changes you made on your blog or email me with them. Decent observation instruments are not easy to find.

I received an email from Brian, a middle school social studies teacher in Boston, who expressed an interest in presenting to his faculty about improving his presentation skills. He wrote:

The creative juices that flow as I try and design better slides has not only provided a nice outlet for me in the weeks before Christmas break…but also helped me get more creative in connections I make to the material.

That’s what it’s all about! If you enjoy creating your slides (I do!), you’ll enjoy presenting them. And if you enjoy presenting them rather than making them just a bunch of notes that you have to “get through,” your audience will enjoy your delivery a whole lot more.

My enthusiasm for your presentation, which I shared with a number of members of my staff, has made me into the resident presentation guru in my building.

Nice. I’m glad to have had this kind of impact!

My principal has asked me to do a presentation on presenting at our upcoming PD and I wondered if you had some advice on how to attack it. My audience would be a frightening mix of the computer savvy and folks who refer to “The Google.” What would you recommend in terms of content? I could see the scope being very broad and touching on why design better slides, how to do it, where to find good images, etc. Or staying narrow and looking at the how part.

First off, I love The Google!

Second, and this is just my two cents, if you’re thinking of presenting on presenting to your staff, you need to provide the context. If that’s how we should be teaching kids, it’s surely how we should be teaching adults.

I didn’t look at my presentation to staff as a “How-To” with respect to PowerPoint (although that’s what some of them came to the session expecting…), I planned it as a “Why-Bother” with the intent of raising the level of awareness of what we’re putting on the screen. If it gave at least one teacher pause before they projected the same, tired slide show for yet another year, I felt my presentation would be worthwhile.

See, the “Why-Bother” actually motivated the “How-To” with about a half-dozen of my attendees. It put it into context for them. Rather than telling them how to do something, I shared with them first why they should care.

And it worked! They stayed after my presentation wanting to know more. “OK - I like how you did that. Now show me how to make my slides look like that.” They’re hooked.

A “How-To” without context may be everything that’s wrong with the way we present professional development to teachers, but that’s for me to tackle down the road. You know - that and this whole “global warming” thing.

Uploaded with Skitch!

My slideshow has been selected by SlideShare as the “Slideshow of the Day” and has been featured on their main page! This is all kind of overwhelming considering I created the slideshow to present to my faculty, then posted it to my blog figuring a couple people might be interested…

Then, based on some requests, I uploaded it to Slideshare and added audio figuring a couple of people might check it out. So imagine my surprise when I had an email in my box this morning saying my little presentation was going to be featured as the “Slideshow of the Day” on their main page.

You asked for it…

For those who expressed interest in a “multimedia” version of my Presentation on Presentations, here is the result of a couple days worth of work. I recorded the voiceover in Garage Band in two takes so there are a couple of flubs (yes, I know video from YouTube isn’t copyrighted, but I didn’t want to go back and re-record…).

Also, SlideShare has a minimum time that each slide must be displayed which causes a minor “out-of-sync” at the end of the slide deck. Other than that, I think it’s a pretty good - albeit “one way” - version of what I presented to my faculty.

Enjoy!

| View | Upload your own

I wrote this post on Monday and wasn’t going to publish it. Then I saw At the Schoolhouse Gate’s recent post about the student who was suspended for posting online a list of students he didn’t like (article here). Seems these here Interwebs have a lot of otherwise level-headed people going off half-cocked.

I’m an active researcher and reader on all things tech and education related, but I never considered the other side of the coin. Having attended a 3-hour meeting this morning at the district office on our “new” filter override process as it relates to CIPA, I am utterly shocked at some of the misinformation that some of my colleagues — intelligent, well-educated, experienced people — have come to assume as fact.

It’s put things into perspective for me, though. Discussing how and when to allow staff members to override the filter is only one piece of the puzzle. Where we consistently fall short is in educating our students and our teachers in responsible use of the Internet.

Overheard this morning:

• Reading a student’s MySpace page is the same thing as viewing the text messages or cameraphone pictures on a confiscated cell phone. Clearly this story out of Boulder has people a little bit gun-shy about what’s private and what’s not. I am not a lawyer, but I see a huge difference in terms of the expectation of privacy. I expect that pictures that reside on the memory card of my camera or phone are private. They’re mine. The second that I put them on Flickr or on my blog, however, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. So something a student has written on his or her (public) MySpace profile is “fair game,” so to speak. Going through the contents of their personal electronics (without reasonable suspicion or, even better, probable cause) is the 21st century equivalent of reading out loud the note you caught a couple of kids trying to pass during your lecture.
• But if a teacher doesn’t attend filter override training and uses some other, non-approved way to bypass the filter (read: proxies, vtunnel, etc.), that’s OK as long as the content they accessed isn’t inappropriate, right? I almost fell out of my chair when I heard this Machiavellian rationalization for what is essentially a violation of the district’s AUP that could result in termination. Circumventing the filter is wrong. People have been fired for less than that.
• Hey - have you guys ever heard of Web 3.0? Yeah. That’s Second Life, World of Warcraft - you know - that stuff. Huh?

To be clear, I don’t blame these individuals for not knowing this stuff, but the longer I sat in that meeting biting my tongue, the more frustrated I continued to get because these are the technology leaders in their respective buildings! We (and by “we,” I mean those of us “in the know”) need to be more cognizant of the fact that although this stuff is old-hat to us, it’s completely foreign to many of the people in our organizations.

Call it “Digital Citizenship” or anything else you want, the fact remains that we need to be focusing at least as much energy on educating students and teachers in information literacy as we do on trying to use brute force to protect them from themselves with poorly-implemented filters.