Category — Leadership

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.

Inspired by both Mr. Meyer’s “How I Work” video as well as another side project to which I contribute, I thought I’d open the new year with a series of posts that highlight some of the tools and strategies that I use to stay on top of things. You know - keep it light. After all, it’s still technically summer.

Anyone who needs to be productive on a daily basis needs to look hard at three important aspects of their lives: managing inputs, doing stuff, and remembering stuff. Today I’m going to take a look at the first of this trio: Managing your inputs.

“Incoming!“

Everyone — teachers, administrators, students — has a constant stream of information coming at them all day long. Remember this, do that, check on this, follow-up with that, etc.

Like others, I’ve noticed that my brain is not exactly the best, most reliable repository for information. I’ll illustrate with a pretty common scenario.

I’m walking down the hall after herding the lovelies into their next class. Here comes the Media Specialist: “Scott, I need you to make sure you let the new teachers know that we are planning a training for our email client after school on Thursday!” Makes sense. I’m responsible for the new teachers in the building. I can do this. I’ll just send off an email when I get back to my office.

I start sauntering back to my office chanting, “New teachers. Email training. Thursday.” Who needs a Hipster PDA? Uh oh. Here comes one of our department chairs. “Hey, Scott. Remember that presentation you did on preparing slide decks that engage students? Yeah - can you email me that? I’d like to use some of your ideas!” Of course! I’ll get right on it just as soon as I email the new teachers about… Ummm… That thing on Thursday. Or is it Friday? In the library? After school? Oh crap.

You can see how the system begins to break down. And this doesn’t even touch on the stuff that comes out of our weekly administrative meetings where we discuss professional development and the general day-to-day operation of the building.

I’ve never been one of those people who could carry a pen and paper everywhere, so for these kinds of “chance” requests, I’ll use my iPhone. If someone approaches me with something that needs to be done I’ll pull out the phone, open up my productivity program of choice (currently vacillating between OmniFocus and Things) , and drop it into the Inbox for processing later. If you subscribe to Remember the Milk, you can text message a Twitter to @rtm and it will zip right into your RTM inbox. If that’s not a mouthful I don’t know what is! Alternately, if I’m driving, I can phone my brain dump into Jott - a speech-to-text service I’ve been using for quite a while.

Meeting of the minds.

I hate taking notes in meetings. I bet you do, too. We do it, however, because it seems like the expected behavior. We all went to school, right? And when the Person In Charge started speaking — whether about the French-Indian War or factoring polynomials — we started writing. We’re well trained.

What bugged me most about taking meeting notes was that I’d never, ever look at them again. I’d file them away thinking, “OK. If anyone asks me what Bill said about new dry erase boards at Monday’s meeting I’ll be ready!” But no one ever asked. Not once.

A couple years ago I came across a great tidbit that liberated me from the compulsive urge to try to scribble down everything in a meeting. It was a post at Behance about their “Action Method.” In short, you should be primarily focused on capturing action steps; stuff that we need to actually do. You don’t have to write down every single piece of information discussed.

“During a brainstorm, meeting, or on the run, ideas arrive in a flurry of other activity and can be lost unless they are captured and transformed into action steps.”

The method’s third component frees me of the guilt of not archiving every single piece of information I receive: “File reference items. Sparingly.” That’s it! What do I do with that binder of notes we have from our monthly department meetings? Throw it out! That folder full of notes scribbled at the professional development workshop you attended in the late-90s? Trash it.

For notes during meetings, I’m definitely a low-tech guy. I have a Levenger letter-sized Circa notebook that holds all the aspects of my non-digital work life. Into the Circa goes any actions that I capture during the meeting. When I’m back in my office, I scan the list and move any relevant items into OmniFocus so they’re available to me at my desk or on my iPhone. Having them digitally enables me to adjust due dates and priorities as well as move them around as needed.

If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me.

Phone calls are a fact of life for most of us, and school-based administrators are no different. Whether it’s a parent calling to request that I fire a math teacher, a district administrator calling to check the status of our school improvement plan, or my wife calling to make sure I pick up diapers on the way home, I take in a lot of information from the phone.

For phone calls, I’ve adopted a one 3×5 card per call/issue method. When I get a call I immediately reach for a blank card and a pen. I’ll immediately date the card and write down the caller’s name and number. If the card requires some action on my part, I’ll do it immediately (if practical and possible) and get back to the caller. Most of these things don’t require entry into OmniFocus because they’re be as simple as “Excuse Johnny’s absence for last Friday. He had a tummy ache.” If they’re bigger (”Set up a conference with the math teacher and the counselor to determine why Andrea can’t seem to remember to go to Trigonometry.”), I may shoot off an email to both parties and put the item in OF to remind make sure I remember to get back to the parent once I hear from the teacher and counselor.

When I’ve finished dealing with an issue, I’ll throw the cards into an old-school 3×5 box arranged chronologically. That way if Mrs. Johnson calls again and says, “Remember when I spoke to you last month about the mean lunch lady?” I can quickly reference that card in my file.

Three-pronged attack.

So those are the basics of my approach to capturing stuff that needs doing. For stand-up meetings in the hallway, I’ll shoot ‘em directly into iPhone. During meetings, I’ll dedicate a page in my Circa to capturing actionable items only. And for phone calls, I use one index card per call or issue.

When you’re capturing items into your inbox, be it physical or electronic, make sure to free yourself from thinking about due dates, projects, contexts, resources, timelines, priorities, etc. and just get the item captured. You’ll deal with the other stuff later.

After years of hacking away at things little by little, I feel like I’ve finally arrived with a system that lets me get things done without worrying that I’m missing something.

Now what?

Assuming you can manage what information is important to you and filter out the stuff that doesn’t require some kind of action on your part, what you should be asking next is, “Now that I’ve got a plan for capturing stuff I need to do, how do I actually make the time to do it?”

The message today is to recognize that you just can’t trust your well-meaning brain to remember important stuff. You’ve got too much coming your way during the day for that. Get it out of your head. Get all of it completely out of your head. That way your brain can focus on solving that whole global warming thing or dreaming up ways to improve the economy.

Coming up: Now that it’s all out of your head, it’s time to start actually doing something with it.

Photo Credits:
“file cabinets” by h. wren
“Bat Phone” by Phillie Casablanca

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?

[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 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.

No, I haven’t lost my job as an assistant principal, I’m just trying to redefine it a little bit.

You’ve heard it before. It’s been played out and talked to death in grad school programs around the country and beat nearly to death around the blogosphere:

School administrators are no longer just able to act as managers. They need to be instructional leaders.

The trouble is, if we aren’t good teachers and learners, how do we know good teaching and learning when we see it? And if we don’t know it when we see it, how can we possibly be expected to lead it?

Sure, we have checklists and observation instruments to help us collect data during classroom observations, but quantifying a teacher based on a checklist and one 20-30 minute visit? Come on - we argue against doing that to kids - how can it possibly be used to help a teacher improve his or her instruction in the classroom?

I believe that we are what we repeatedly do. If teachers and students see us sitting in our offices plugging away on paperwork and doling out discipline, that becomes our job description. On the other hand, if we spend time out in the building, visiting classrooms, even teaching classes, it will go along way toward being seen in that other light. I’m a teacher and I’ve never stopped trying to improve at it.

Sounds easy. We’ve, of course, heard it before. But I made a commitment this year to actually do it instead of just talking and reading about it. The side effects? Here’s a mid-year report on some of my findings:

• I’ve finished all of my “district-required” teacher evals. So I can just sit in my office and coast until May, right? No. In fact, the side effect of this one is that when my teachers know that their evals are done, my continued presence in their classrooms is a little less threatening. Suddenly, I’m there to support, not to evaluate. That in itself has changed the teacher/administrator dynamic. We’ve gotten the “official” stuff out of the way - now let’s get down to the good stuff.
• I’m in classrooms. A lot. My proudest moment this year was when a student came up to me in the halls and said, “So, like, what are you? In all my classes or something?”
• Teaching a class, even if it’s just occasionally, earns you instant credibility with students. Who would’ve thunk it? I taught one Calculus class for a teacher on Monday and now the students — students who I would typically never get to meet — are high-fiving me in the hall and calling me Mr. Calculus. They asked the teacher if she would always get Mr. Elias to “sub” for her. Now, I’m not saying I did a bang-up job in there - I did OK. But I think the novelty of having an administrator who actually taught (read: didn’t just get called in to babysit while the “real” sub was on the way in) kept them engaged. Plus, I’m sure watching me struggle through a bleary recollection and attempted explanation of Rolle’s Theorem, while painful for me, was especially enjoyable for them.
• Teaching a class, even if it’s just occasionally, earns you instant credibility with teachers. I had some appreciative comments from the math department for stepping in. But who would have expected a Language Arts teacher to walk up to me yesterday and remark, “I heard you’re a pretty good Calculus teacher.” The kids are being very generous, of course, but it was nice to hear just the same.

So I didn’t think I was doing anything special, but lo and behold the little things add up. I’ve earned instant street cred. Now when I talk about instruction, my audience knows I’m not afraid to walk the walk.

It’s made me a better administrator instructional leader, it’s improved my job satisfaction (I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked before, but on good stuff instead of a constant stream of disciplinary infractions!), and it’s made me aspire to be a better teacher myself.

It’s taken me a few years to get to this point, but it’s been worth the ride. So, administrators, if you’re sitting in your office mired in paperwork and a stack of referrals, stand up, grab a master schedule, and start wandering in and out of classrooms. Check to see which teachers will be out of the building on Friday and offer to pick up a class or two for them - it’s a busy sub day in most schools so you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding an uncovered class or two!

We are what we repeatedly do. So make sure that what you’re doing is the stuff that really matters.

On Wednesday I had an opportunity to present to a sub-set of the faculty on some ideas for improving their use of presentation software. It’s been a rub with me that teachers (and administrators - myself included!) have abused slides as the 21st century equivalent of the overhead projector.

Embarrassingly enough, until I started reading and researching about presenting, the only rule of thumb I followed was, “Don’t read directly from the slides.” Although that’s great advice and a wonderful start, it’s only the tip of the iceberg as it relates to creating effective presentations.

The more time I spent at staff development presentations where presenters were telling administrators and teachers about “effective delivery of instruction,” but not practicing what they were preaching, the more frustrated I continued to get. You can’t stand in front of a room full of educators reading your slides bullet-by-bullet and not expect to hear mass snoring.

The most rewarding thing to me was that six of the attendees actually stayed after the presentation with their laptops open and asked me pretty detailed questions about how I designed my slides and how they could improve some of their dated presentations. We ended up hanging out for about a half hour and I am planning to schedule some time to follow up with each of them in their classrooms to maybe watch and provide feedback on their presentations.

• The PDF (11 MB) - I embellished a little on my presentation notes to make it closer to what I actually said rather than just my outline.
• The Keynote (12 MB) - The full presentation in Keynote.

Update 12/16/07: Now posted with audio at Slideshare. Enjoy!

I’ve got a couple of papers to write for a grad school class I’m taking on “Ethics and Professionalism in Education.” One of them needs to focus on an “acculturation experience” from my life or career. I think I’ve been “acculturated” so many times that I didn’t know where to start. Moving from school to school? Moving from Florida to Colorado? There were a lot of differences and adjustments that had to be made in those situations, to be sure. But last week I had something happen that smacked me on the head with the most challenging adjustment I’ve had to make in my professional career.

I think that when you’re an effective teacher, it’s kind of natural to surround yourself with other effective teachers who work with kids the same way you do — treating them with dignity and respect, and believing that they can be successful. It’s easy to believe that all teachers feel the same way about their job that you do. The minority — those “other” teachers — are kind of just “out there” doing what they do and it doesn’t really affect you.

But one thing I’ve discovered about myself since moving from the classroom to the administrative offices is that I am passionate about treating kids right. Few things get under my skin more than adults who treat kids in ways that they themselves wouldn’t want to be treated. Slamming the metaphorical door in the face of students who have ditched class a few times, using “policy” as an excuse to back kids into corners, and the like.

Out of respect for those involved, I’m going to avoid addressing specific incidents, but indulge me in a fictitious example of what I’m talking about.

A minority female student who is a 17-year-old 11th grader ditches quite a few classes during first quarter. Her administrator calls home and speaks with Grandpa - her guardian - to apprise him of the fact that if the student’s attendance pattern continues she will most likely be dropped from our rolls for non-attendance making her a high school dropout.

The next morning, the student shows up in the administrators office to apologize. Notebook and pens in hand, she is ready to try school one last time. Since she hasn’t been to class in a month, she asks for a copy of her schedule and tells the administrator that she is going to work hard so she doesn’t drop out of school.

Student leaves the office and goes to her first period class where Teacher says to her, “You? What are you doing here? I thought I withdraw-failed you weeks ago. You know you’ve got a zero in here so there’s really no point in you even coming back…”

I have to wonder how Teacher would feel if I had a post-observation conference with him that went like this: “You’re not cutting it. Your lectures are dull, your students are half-asleep. I don’t know why you bother. They’ll never pass the state test so maybe you should just retire now.”

Granted the success-to-failure ratio of students who are going to “turn it around” is incredibly low. And most of these kids are in so deep that by the time they get to be 16 or 17 that they can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. But I just don’t know how I’d sleep at night if I turned away a kid who asked for one more chance based on the failure rate of those who have gone before her.

So I think I can pull a paper out of that. An 8-page account of my “acculturation” to administration. An experience where I quickly learned that not every teacher shares the same values as me. I promised myself when I was a teacher that I wouldn’t “burn out;” I would avoid becoming one of “those teachers” who sat in the lounge cracking about how dumb kids and administrators are. Fortunately for kids, most teachers like kids. And most that I’ve come across would bend over backwards to help a kid who asks.

And most teachers I see entering the profession today have a positive, idealistic mindset that I try hard to preseve. They believe in trying to teach all kids, that everyone should have a fair crack at an education, and that making mistakes — sometimes big ones — is part of the learning process.

Now, as an administrator, I have promised myself that I wouldn’t become one of “those administrators.” You know - the ones who want to be feared; who value their reputations as “The Hammer.” No. If I’m going to be accused of anything it’s going to be that I went the extra mile for too many kids.

Yeah. I can live with criticism like that.