• May saw some significant layoffs due to a RIF in my district. Not a lot of fun for a first-year principal who spent the entire year building culture.
• June was a great month for me as it was the second summer that I was fortunate to teach “Leadership & Ethics in Public Education” in the principal licensure cohort at CSU.
• July started with an amazing family road trip to see my grandmother for her 90th birthday, take the kids to Washington, DC, and visit my brother and his family in Charlotte.
• July into August I was back at work planning and working with my new assistant principal on clarifying a vision for my second year leading the best middle school on the Front Range.

And what’s to come this year?

• I just finished and defended my preliminary exam so I’m officially a PhD candidate now. Or, “ABD.”
• I am working on my dissertation proposal and hoping to defend this fall.
• I’ve got several staff members who will be joining me as presenters at the CAMLE Schools-to-Watch Conference in a few weeks.
• Hopefully, after a marathon 2010-2011 year in which I was a brand new principal and completed my final four (yes, four…) required grad school classes, Melinda and I will be able to make time to record your favorite podcast on a semi-regular basis again.

More later!

The Why

I have a personal goal to support teachers in talking to each other about their practice. As Elmore points out, “one of the greatest barriers to school improvement is the lack of an agreed-upon definition of what high-quality instruction looks like” (p. 3). The rounds process is intended to bring conversations about instructional practice into the school improvement process. The rounds process is adapted from the medical rounds model and includes “observing, analyzing, discussing, and understanding instruction” (p. 3).

My hope is that I can expand this school-wide next year, but I wanted to start small. I worked with my instructional coach to solicit seven teacher volunteers to be part of this pilot. I have a cross-section of disciplines, grade levels, and experience and we meet biweekly for a total of seven sessions. Each teacher will open their classroom to the group one time and have the opportunity to observe the other six over the course of the pilot.

In Elmore’s parlance, I have a theory of action that looks something like this:

If we develop and nurture a school culture that supports collaborative inquiry and the sharing of best teaching practices, then classroom instruction will be strengthened and students will learn in deeper, more authentic ways.

The How

The participants voluntarily come in to pre-brief at 6:45am on lab days. They have no incentive other than coffee and conversation along with their commitment to improve their practice through sharing in the lab experience. Though all participants are observing the same class at the same time, each bring a different inquiry question to the lab experience. These questions run the gamut and are highly dependent on the teachers’ interests and perceived areas for growth.

Some examples of inquiry questions from this group:

• How can a teacher foster global citizenship in his or her students?
• What strategies do teachers use to get students talking about text?
• How can social studies teachers more effectively include historical fiction in their units of instruction?
• How can I move students from external accountability to intrinsic responsibility for their learning?
• How can I ensure that my lessons are authentic and connect students with the larger social context?

The teacher being observed may also pose a specific question related to their class being observed. These questions are posted on our neopolitan-colored “Board of Inquiry.”

At our pre-brief, we also assign people to track specific data that the host teacher requests. For instance, this morning we tracked:

• Use of vocabulary by teacher and students that indicates “global literacy”
• Connections from historical fiction text to self
• Wait time between posing a questions and selecting a student to respond

The most challenging part is arranging class coverage for the observing teachers so that we can all be together to observe and de-brief the process. I am very passionate about the success of this pilot and have committed to using a chunk of the sub dollars allocated to me for professional development. On lab days, we use in-house coverage only when absolutely necessary, instead bringing in four or five half-day subs to cover for lab participants.

Following the one-hour classroom observation, we take a short break, top off our coffees, and re-convene for a de-brief.

Once everyone is back together, we sit silently for a few minutes to reflect on our initial observations. We go quickly around the table, sharing an objective, non-value-laden observation about what we’ve seen. Our instructional coach then leads the group through a discussion connecting one or two of the principles from the Elmore book to the lesson we observed.

It is at this point in the process that the requested data is shared and processed, along with other relevant information. For instance, this morning one of the participants noted that the host teacher had asked 70 questions in a 60-minute observation.

The hour-long debrief process usually flies by, and ultimately ends with each participant sharing something that they believe they have learned about the host teachers core principles. Examples include:

• Ms. X seems to value every student’s contribution to her class.
• It seems very important to Ms. X that her students access their personal experience to build background knowledge before tackling new text.
• Based on the discussion, it seems like Ms. X has high expectations that students are able to connect course content to real-world contexts.

Final Thoughts (For Now)

We are two lab cycles in to our pilot project and we continue to re-visit the norms we established at the outset. It is incredibly courageous of the teacher participants to open up their classrooms to their colleagues, and all have expressed their nervousness to do so.

All in all, I think the two teachers who have hosted to this point have come away feeling positive about the experience. My hope is to generate enough energy and momentum to roll this out school-wide next year. The logistics of pulling this off with 44 full-time faculty will be a bit of a challenge, but I believe passionately that this is the work we should be doing so I am committed to figuring out how to make it happen even if it means I’ll be covering classes.

As with the introduction of anything completely new, I explained to them the trade-off I was willing to make. My school was functioning under an intense “culture of meetings” that, in my opinion, was a little excessive. I committed to them to cut down on meeting times, but the trade-off was that all “FYI” items — without exception — would be posted on a private staff blog and that they were responsible for checking it every day.

Knowing that there would still be some for whom this was uncomfortable, I enabled a “subscribe by email” button at the top of the page. This meant that it was up to each individual to subscribe if they wanted to continue to receive school news via email. For me, this meant that I still only had to post in one place.

As a last bit of insurance, I worked with our school technologist to ensure that our staff blog was the browser start-up page on teacher computers. This means that it’s staring them in the face every time they open their browsers.

The benefits of the staff blog as I have seen them unfold this year are:

• Information is archived. How many emails do you get from staff who absent-mindedly deleted that email with the attachment they needed? I’ve been guilty of this myself! On the blog, everything is categorized and archived by month so the assembly schedule we used in October is still there when we need it again in January.

• Information is searchable. Technically, email is searchable, too, but if you’ve ever used FirstClass as your email client you’ll know that this is less than ideal. Plus, with the small mailbox sizes we are allocated, and the wonky way FC duplicates emails when you reply or forward, people tend to delete stuff.

• Comments are way more efficient than emailing. This one was a bit unexpected, but it’s probably the biggest benefit. Say you post about an upcoming event and you omit an important piece of information. If you had emailed it, you’d get 10 or 15 emails asking for clarification and you’d have to either reply to each one or send one of those, “Oops! I’m sorry I forgot to tell you that Friday’s dance has an 80s theme…” emails. On the blog, one person asks the question in the comments and I can answer it once,

Overall, I think this has been a successful experiment. I think one of the primary reasons is that I articulated the purpose clearly as a reduction in wasted meeting time. Also, the cold-turkey approach was the only way to go. I don’t think this would have worked as effectively had I continued to send emails and post on the blog.

It didn’t take long for the hold-outs to come around when there was something they didn’t know about. I overheard more than one conversation along the lines of, “How did you know about [whatever]?”

“It was posted on the blog yesterday. Don’t you check it?”

Also, as with the team blogs, support is critical. This was new for people so hand-holding was critical for some while some were off and running right away. Some people stress out very easily because they “just aren’t good with technology” so it’s critical to support them in the early stages.

At this point in the year, there are four of us who have rights to post on the staff blog. I want to expand this next year to make it even more collaborative and to reinforce it as the “one-stop shop” for all things school related.

In order to move this process into the 21st century and take advantage of the readily available tools for collaboration that are found online, I worked closely with my Leadership Team. This did not happen overnight, in fact I started planting the seeds well before I even broached the topic of moving data dialogues online. First, I began sharing meeting agendas and other documents with them via Google Docs. It was my hope that by starting slowly, they’d get comfortable using (or at least interacting with) GDocs to collaborate and share documents. I would say 75% of them immediately saw the benefits of using GDocs over the traditional method of passing documents around and hoping you were working with the most current version.

Once I was comfortable that most of my Leadership Team were on board, I worked closely with my Instructional Coach — as I usually would with or without GDocs — to craft some guiding questions for our data dialogues. I had her create a GDoc with the questions in it which were shared with team leaders. Team leaders were then responsible for sharing it with their teams and collaborating on their responses. One of the benefits to the teams was that one person was no longer required to be “the recorder” because once the document was shared, any team member was able to type directly into the document.

Through this whole process, my AP, my Instructional Coach, and I all had access to each team’s template so we could monitor their progress any time without having to mail documents back and forth. This freed teams to move from our (extremely hot in August) media center to other locations on campus where they had the resources they needed to do their work.

The Mechanics

I knew I was in for an uphill battle if I owned the process of sharing documents one at a time with each member of the staff so here’s how I set things up…

I created a folder for each team and shared that folder with the team leader, my instructional coach, my AP, and any other special service providers who generally need access to the student data. Now, anything I place in that folder is automatically shared with the team leader whose responsibility it was to invite other team members into their team folder. So instead of worrying about permissions for 50-60 staff, I only had to worry about 7 folders and team leaders.

Once team leaders had invited their team members to the team folder, everyone had access to everything in the folder. Additionally, you’ll see folders for supporting documents, agendas, minutes, and attendance. Those are used by my SAAC chair to track our monthly meetings.

Since most everyone seemed comfortable, if not completely enamored, with this new process, I decided to ask team leaders to keep their regular team meeting minutes in their team folders so that I wouldn’t get seven separate Word documents mailed to me every Monday afternoon that I’d have to open, save, and file. Now all team meeting minutes are in one place and they’re filed the instant they’re created.

Finally, I created a “Data” folder that I shared with all team leaders. Into this folder, I toss every PDF and Excel file that I receive. This avoids the necessity of emailing large data files around that clog up teachers’ email boxes. Rarely do people need to look at those emails the instant they arrive so they either sit in the inbox until they’re needed or they get filed and/or lost. Using a data folder means that everything is easily accessible and that I can avoid re-sending emails if and when data is lost.

Yes. Much of the data comes to us in PDFs. Don’t get me started.

How’s it working for you?

Knowing that this whole process was new to many teachers, it was critical that they felt supported and confident that they could take the risk and stumble. At every Leadership Team meeting, we have an agenda item that opens the floor to input and feedback about the process. During the first month or so of school, I would meet regularly with team leaders with no other agenda other than to have them get out their laptops and practice creating and sharing documents and folders.

Though it eventually tapered off, for the first few weeks I would regularly have teachers come to my office or approach me in the hall and ask for help doing this or that. I was acutely aware that the first time they didn’t feel supported the whole stack of cards I’d been building would become dangerously unstable so it was — and continues to be — very important to me that I personally worked with every teacher who was having trouble for as long as it took them to get comfortable.

I didn’t provide a “way out” or safety net. The only way to capture evidence of a team’s data dialogue and their action plans was via Google Docs. For the few who brought me paper copies, I’d say something like, “This looks great! Make sure you copy it over to your team folder on Google Docs so I can review it.”

“Don’t you just want the paper?”

“No. I’ll lose it. I’d like them all the completed documents in Google Docs so that I know everything’s in the same place and I know where to find everyone’s plans. Thanks for taking the time to do that!”

Not using Google Docs was simply not an option.

How did it go?

This is a tough one to answer. I have really enjoyed the staff, the students, and the work of being a middle school principal. I love coming to work every day and feel like we are moving forward collectively as a school.

One thing I quickly learned is that many of the “big ideas” out there on the Internet about how schools should be, how teachers should teach, and how leaders should lead are inadequate for actually getting anything accomplished. There are wonderful, inspiring ideas out there, but after reading many, many blog posts over the first semester I often found myself wondering, “So what?” or “But how did you actually do that?” I’m not asking for a step-by-step how-to, but I find myself drawn to the kinds of actionable posts like this one or this one rather than the more nebulous “feel good” posts I sometimes read.

This is not a criticism so much as an indication of where I am personally and professionally. I’ve got big ideas, but I need to hear and read the stories of how you brought yours to fruition. For leaders just getting into this “online, social networking stuff” big idea posts are very appropriate.

What are the biggest differences between middle school and high school?

Where to begin? After 13 years of teaching and leading at the high school level there were a few big surprises about middle school. Right off the bat I noticed that the kids — mostly — still like the principal. It’s not that high school students didn’t like their principals, but the default setting at high school seems to be indifference. Of course, that’s the high school student’s default setting for a lot of things… My students often approach me with a high-five, fist-bump, or just to ask me about my day. Very cool.

I’ve found that I really like the team approach to instruction that we have at my school. It gives every student a core group of teachers who are invested and who meet regularly to talk about what’s working with each student. That kind of tight-knit structure is possible at high school, but given the multiple courses and levels is far more difficult to schedule.

What have you done?

I really took this quote from Rework by Jason Fried to heart from my first day on the job:

Getting to great starts by cutting out stuff that’s merely good.

My goal was to reduce the sense (real or imagined) of being overwhelmed by initiatives and programs and get to the core of what has worked as far as moving toward our district goals of high achievement, growth for all students, and closing the gap. This started with some serious conversations about data and required a sense of trust that there were no “sacred cows” and that nothing was “off the table” in terms of what could be de-emphasized.

We still have a long way to go in streamlining and increasing efficiency in what we do, but making it OK to take things off your plate that are not working effectively has made for what I believe is a positive, collaborative culture.

Another big core belief of mine is that educators deserve to be treated as professionals. As such it was important for me to create a sense of professional autonomy. Of course, this has to be balanced with some overarching parameters and core values which we worked on as a staff.

As an example of how this played out for me this year, I started small by focusing on some core values or, what I called “guiding principles,” around our weekly 1-hour intervention time. Teams have had the autonomy to break kids into groups for enrichment, remediation, and “catch-up” during this time. However, there was some confusion over what constituted an acceptable use of that time. To start the conversation, I opened up a Google Doc and had teams put in random sentences and snippets to brainstorm some ways that they felt would be a positive use of this time. Once I had enough to work with, I applied my (emerging) qualitative research skills and did some simple coding to see what trends would emerge. I took the “top 10” and put them on a Google Form and had the staff rank them from highest to lowest. I took that data and shared it with team leaders and had teams discuss the results and we eventually got down to five “guiding principles.” The goal for me was to not have teachers wondering, “Is it OK if I do this? What about that?” and start them on the road to assessing whether their Intervention Time plans align with our guiding principles.

The process sounds more difficult than it was. I’d say staff spent a total of 15 minutes brainstorming and then, a week later, maybe 15 more minutes reading and ranking. And in the end we ended up with some loose structure to guide this mostly unstructured time.

What did you learn?

Lots. And I’m continuing to learn every day. Mostly thanks to my incredible staff, strong support from district leadership, and many of my virtual colleagues around the internet.

When it comes right down to it, though, these are rituals that are deeply ingrained in the culture of our school. Most schools have a similar situation.

Long, low-energy meetings tend to distract and mute the day. – Martin Fowler

The trouble with throwing out meetings completely is that they do have some value. According to a few papers summarized here, meetings can help achieve the following:

• Shared commitment
• Communicate daily status, progress, and plans to the team and any observers
• Identify obstacles so that the team can take steps to remove them
• Set direction and focus
• Build a team

Being a new leader and getting to know my staff, I’m not willing to cut out all meetings. But what I am committed to doing is making sure that every minute we spend in some kind of meeting serves to move forward the school’s mission and agenda.

Zero-Based Meeting Budgeting We’re going to get back to basics. At the first regular, monthly meeting of our leadership team, we will remove every meeting from our calendars and begin adding back in those meetings that make sense and will move us toward our goals. We will no longer meet four times per month if we can accomplish the same objective in two highly-productive, focused meetings.

Less meeting time focused on dissemination of information Since my first day on the job, I’ve made some changes that I hope will whittle down the sheer volume of meeting time. Depending on the sensitivity, items that are “information only” in nature go into an email to team leaders or onto our school blog or wiki. Weening people off email has gone well so far, in no small part thanks to my very flexible group of teacher leaders who have been willing to jump into some new ways of doing business.

Two things I’ve learned in trying to bring this level of change to the day-to-day business of an organization are (1) stop trying to use the “inducement” approach to improving processes and systems (see letter B of Scott’s post on RSS for PD), and (2) stop asking questions like “Do you use Google Docs?” in favor of questions like, “To which email address should I send the invite for this document we’re working on?” It’s all about positive presuppositions. Of course we’re using Google Docs! I mean, who isn’t?

I’ll let you know how it goes, but it’s a start! Look for an upcoming post with more detail on the process of paper-reduction in a 40-year-old middle school.

Interesting reads I plan to share with the team:

• The 22-Minute Meeting
• It’s Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-Up Meetings

Don’t be afraid to show your flaws. Imperfections are real and people respond to real. It’s why we like real flowers that wilt, not perfect plastic ones that never change. Don’t worry about how you’re supposed to sound and how you’re supposed to act. Show the world what you’re really like, warts and all. So talk like you really talk. Reveal things that others are unwilling to discuss. Be upfront about your shortcomings. Show the latest version of what you’re working on, even if you’re not done yet. It’s OK if it’s not perfect. You might not seem as professional, but you will seem a lot more genuine.

Like some other schools with diverse student populations, our students need a variety of supports – both academic and personal – to achieve “proficiency” on state tests. While I’m not a fan of this kind of assessment of our kids or our schools, as a new principal I believe that arguing about the merits of said tests is best left to the policy wonks. It’s the hand we’re dealt for now, and as a new principal I’m focusing first on those things within my control.

So my main objective in the near-term is to support my teachers in wrapping their heads around the idea that student success as measured on our state standardized tests and student success as measured by their ability to communicate, collaborate, and produce content in an interconnected, global community are not mutually exclusive.

When I first landed in the Big Chair, I ramped up my scouring of the blogs of other school leaders. What I found was an abundance of ideas, lists of tools and apps, advice on being a good Tweeter, and the like. I’m certainly guilty of posts like this…

What I’ve become increasingly focused on is moving from ideas and feel-good blog posts to action. One of my goals is to renew my use of this space and to spend time writing and reflecting about my actions in this first year as principal. I want to look at things that I actually do as a new principal that might improve systems, culture, and learning in my school with the goal of cultivating an environment that empowers students to learn and develop their identities as global citizens and world-class learners.

I’ll probably fall on my face. I might do that more than once. But at least I’ll try to maintain a good record of my thoughts and actions and how they play out in this organization. Maybe they’ll even help someone else who is entrusted with the exciting but very real responsibility of being a principal.

Some topics I will be addressing in upcoming posts:

• Re-imagining a culture of meetings
• Developing a manageable system of academic interventions that address students’ individual needs
• Moving a 40-year-old school into the 21st century
• Paring back “initiative bloat”
• Doing my best not to reinforce the status quo
• Quite frankly, anything else that comes to mind…

So stick around. This could get interesting.

She spent some time asking me about my vision for my school, but also asked for input on a few things. For instance, she wanted to know what I thought would be the best use of our monthly “levels meetings.” During these times, all the elementary principals, middle school principals, and high school principals get together with their colleagues. As a new principal, this time is going to be invaluable for me to learn from my colleagues at the other middle schools. My suggestion was that as much of the levels meeting time as possible be spent on sharing best practices, collaborating, and learning from each other. Administrivia, or the unidirectional flow of information items that could be handled via email or a memo should not eat into this valuable time that we will have out of our buildings once per month.

I was also very flattered that she asked me about blogging, and about how the Director of Secondary Education might make use of a blog. Like others I have worked with, she is an “article sender.” I’m certain most educational organizations have a person or persons who will send an email or two a week with some “suggested reading” attached or linked. I shared with her that with the high volume of email that I and other principals receive, it’s not unusual for something that isn’t an “emergency” to get overlooked for a day or two. Further, I don’t really care for email attachments as I think they’re an extremely inefficient way to pass along information.

One other assumption in the article-emailing model is that the information is getting to all of the people who need or are interested in it. This involves managing multiple email lists: one for high school principals, one for middle school principals, one for assistant principals… The list goes on. No matter how carefully you curate the lists, someone who wanted the information will be left out, and someone who doesn’t want it will have to either file it away forever because they think they might be asked about it someday, or (gasp!) delete it.

Even if the sole purpose for creating a Director of Secondary Education blog was to share articles and links, this would be a significant benefit to the folks at the buildings. My preferred way of receiving news is via Reeder on my iPad or Google Reader on my MacBook Pro. From there, I’ll often route longer readings to Instapaper so I can focus on them when I have the time.

Further, a blog would bring leaders and prospective leaders in as opposed to an email that is pushed out. I usually have one or two administrative interns who work with me and, despite my best intentions, I don’t always remember to pass along the articles and links that come my way. A blog would be a great forum to bring these up-and-coming leaders into the “fold” and increase their awareness of what is being discussed at the District and principal level.

Finally, with the ability to comment on blog posts, I could see a blog becoming a better place for discussion than the endless CC loops that email encourages and that, for better or worse, eventually get ignored or archived so I can come back later which I rarely remember to do.

It will definitely take some re-norming with principals, but I think given the success of June’s Leadership Bootcamp we are in a great position to start leveraging some more of these one-to-many means of communicating.

Overall, we had what I think was a very productive meeting and I’m excited to work with my new Director in the coming year. Plus, anyone who shows up in my office bearing breakfast burritos and Loveland Coffee knows how to set the tone for a great year!

1. Relationships with faculty and staff
2. Relationships with community
3. Learning the school

Being appointed as principal (as opposed to going through a lengthy interview process) presents a unique situation. Being appointed as principal in the summer when the teachers are already on break presents still more uniqueness. It’s a challenge to begin building relationships when no one is physically present.

To start things off on a positive note, one of the first things I did after the official announcement was made was to send an introductory email to the staff. I’ve seen some graduate programs in ed leadership that make prospective principals write “introductory memos,” but I didn’t want to be so formal. I kept it light, shared how excited I was to be joining the staff, gave a little bit of my professional and personal background, and then wished them a great summer.

Finally, I invited them to call or email me and set up a time to talk in a semi-structured setting. When we chat, I am looking for three things: what they are most proud of at the school, what they think needs work, and what they expect from their new principal. I’ve already met with a few staff members and hope to meet with many more before we officially get together in August.

Beyond the school, relationship-building with the parents and community will begin with a redesign and modernization of our school’s webpage. Once “live,” the web page will include a “Principal’s Message” in which I will share much of the same information I shared with the staff about who I am and how I got here. Among other things, I am striving to soothe any anxiety about the change in leadership at the school and communicate that I am kid-focused and committed to maintaining the school as a source of pride for students, parents, and the neighborhood.

Learning the school is far more personal. It begins in the conversations with staff, but also includes a review of relevant documents, including accountability reports, test data, parent/teacher/student climate and culture survey data, and any written history I can find. I have been very fortunate that my “ethnography” has yielded a wealth of information on the school’s namesake, Conrad Ball, and the history of the building since its construction was approved by the Board in 1969.

A visual ethnography of the campus can yield data about the hidden or unspoken culture of the school. What messages are the walls and classrooms communicating that the adults may not even be aware of? There’s a small window of time, during which I am still a newcomer to this culture, where I can observe it as an outsider before becoming part of the fabric.

It’s hard to believe that some of us are back to work already, but I am doing my part to ensure a smooth start to 2010-2011 at my new school.