When students cross the school gate, they do not leave their culture, sense of belonging, or identities behind. Schools create societies, sometimes mirroring and sometimes in contradiction to the society around them. When we walk into schools, we can often feel the energy, the passion,
Three Ways that School Leaders Can Protect Teachers from Burnout By Joseph Jones, TJ Vari, Connie Hamilton Difficult to pinpoint and often unrecognized at first, burnout creeps in as fatigue, distraction, and even frustration. As that happens, purpose and certainty are pushed out. If teachers cannot get
How can you tell if your school system has a culture that enables innovation? If you’re an education leader aiming to transform teaching and learning to better serve all students, do a quick culture check by considering these scenarios: If teachers want to work together on instructional design or assessment strategies, do they have space and time for shared
Preface Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone… –Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” When I wrote the essay below in late January 2020, few among us had any idea how quickly life would change as we encounter the worldwide
Becoming a unifying leader requires a deep knowledge of your community and a willingness to be a collaborator. Your success in this endeavor lies, in part, in your ability to listen thoughtfully to your community members in order to learn about their needs and refine the lens through
What descriptive words come to mind when you imagine a classroom teacher, a site principal, a central administrator? Doug Reeves explores an inverse relationship between the size of a district’s strategic plan and its magnitude of impact on student achievement. I write today to study the inverse relationship between power and trust between a senior leader and his/her employees. First let’s define trust
I have had a deep interest in educational research for a long time. It started in my undergraduate years when I was studying to be a teacher. The topics of equity and access were areas of interest that grew into ways to rethink school classrooms and leadership. I remember teaching
Many educators ask how to use advisory groups to support success in middle school and high school. I’ve been asked if a study skills curriculum is effective in advisory, or a social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum, or an experiential education curriculum. They might all be useful
Collaboration. It’s a word we have a lot about, and often believe we do it, but it seems to be more about getting it done than getting it done right. Why? As leaders, we want teachers to collaborate with each other or around our ideas,
As an administrator, it is easy to fall into this trap of being a manager who does (almost) nothing but take care of day-to-day (or weekly) issues/problems/events as they arise. As current administrators, we can definitively say