We have a couple things to confess. Michael, he will admit, spends WAY too much time listening to sports talk radio. And in so doing he hears WAY too many bad arguments of this sort: “I just have this feeling that the Eagles will have a
Why Terms That Typecast Need to Be Ousted from Our Speaking Vocabularies “There was this one time when we lost Slow Joe in the city,” my father said in the midst of telling me one of his sweet stories about his days in the 1960’s as a
A school’s culture is the result of how teachers, students, parents, and the local community embrace a school’s environment and support the school’s mandate to successfully nurture the students’ learning. When evaluating a school’s culture, one must consider the needs of the community and how
How often have you heard the words “research-based” used in your presence? Are you tired of hearing them? If you often drop those words in a conversation, are you sure you are using them correctly? Have you read the research, or just merely looked at
I am a huge fan of Rocky and I’ve watched the movie a dozen times. Do you know what the 72 steps Rocky ran up were made of? They were made of mindset (and stone too). The character of Rocky Balboa possesses growth mindset in
As I drove the thirty-minute commute to work each day, I would prepare for those anticipated debunks – the upset parent wanting a schedule change, the conscientious teacher wanting the air in her room regulated, the secretary trying to fill a classroom vacancy, and a
In 2015, I conducted a nationwide survey of 6th-12th graders that asked one simple question: What engages you as learners? The results that came back could be categorized into 10 different strategies. But one request that came up over and over again, regardless of whether
This is the third of a four part series on increasing the effectiveness of the teacher evaluation process. The original post outlining this work can be found here and provides the groundwork for why teacher evaluation must be ‘fixed.’ This post speaks to three quick
As a school leader, your staff looks to you for answers to the problems and obstacles they are facing. Instead of providing the answer every time, what if you could use a coaching approach to help your staff build the skills and resiliency to create
Do you believe all students can learn? Of course you do. In this post, we’re focusing on what it takes for all educators to believe they can educate all learners in ways that view students’ cultures as assets. Not too many years ago, educators would proclaim,