In the Lead

It’s amazing what having a child does to your perspective.  The entire time I was pregnant with our first child, I remember everyone telling me how much having a child changes everything.  I would always think, “Of course it changes everything.  I’m a smart enough person to know I’ll sleep less, order take-out more, and empathize with other parents on an airplane when they fly with their young children.”  Some folks tried to convince me that more things change than just sleep patterns, especially when our child enters school.  Again, I thought, “These people don’t know anything about me.  Don’t they know my husband and I are educators?  Don’t they know I grew up with two parents as educators?  Puh-lease people, give me a break!”

Then I woke up one day and found myself with a child entering Kindergarten.

All of a sudden those parent letters started coming addressed to ME.  The handbook signature form had to be signed by ME.  Lunch money had to be paid by ME.  I’m now officially a parent of a school-aged child.  (Sigh)  Where did my life go?

I have a confession:  Elementary Education is foreign to me.  Sure, I work in at the district level in the areas of Curriculum & Instruction, but I have a very smart colleague who deals with everything in the elementary buildings.  My responsibility rests in our secondary schools.  My self-report is this:  I’ve been so busy in my own secondary world I haven’t always paid the best attention to conversations in my office area regarding elementary education.  My perspective has now changed.  Consider me an elementary education sponge.

One thing that I believe will never change is my belief in how to interact with others when you are in a leadership capacity (principal or teacher).  Now that I’m a parent of a Kindergartner, this means even more to me.  I value communication with my child’s teacher.  I am thankful when I get feedback on her progress in school.  I know when I have a concern, my child’s teacher is going to help me solve the problem.

One thing I wasn’t ready for quite yet was being on the other side of the desk.  Those of you who are parents of children who are or who have been in elementary school know the feeling:  sitting in a child-sized chair across a child-sized table from your child’s teacher listening to the teacher tell you how your child is progressing and where your child has challenges.  For so long I’ve been in the teacher chair (a much larger one at the secondary level mind you).  It didn’t ever occur to me until now how powerful those parent-teacher conversations can be.

Now I’m reflecting on all of those conferences I had with parents I scan my brain trying to remember if I made them feel like they were an integral part of their child’s learning.  Did I address their concerns clearly?  Did I give them enough feedback on their child’s progress in my class?  Was I able to speak to what their child knew?

Now that I’m on the other side of the desk, I know how valuable that information can be.

Photos:

Tulipanes (tulips) – zoom it! by PCharlon on Flickr

Zona de Ninos by JavierPsilocybin on Flickr

Lined up! by MikeWebkist on Flickr

The other day, I came home from work and was met by my son who ecstatically yelled, “MOMMY!” as I walked up the steps in our home.  This is usually followed by a, “Hi, Mommy,” from my daughter, but on this particular day this wasn’t the case.  I found my daughter in the kitchen sitting at the table staring off into the distance.  The following exchange occurred:

Me: “Hi there! How was school today?”

Daughter: “Hi.”

Me: “How was school today?”

Daughter: “Fine.”

Me: “You feeling okay?”

Daughter: “Yes.”

Me: “Are you sure? You don’t seem fine. Is everything ok?”

Daughter: “Yes.”

I knew better than that. This is a highly energetic 5-year old who talks my ear off about her day at school from the minute I get home to the minute she goes to bed. I had a feeling she wasn’t feeling okay.  I didn’t know what it was, but the look in her eyes told me she wasn’t herself. The next day, she woke up complaining her throat hurt.  I could tell she wasn’t on her game, but she had no fever and ate her breakfast just fine.  By the time the school day was over, she lost most of her voice and was exhausted. I kicked myself that I didn’t do something before she got worse when I knew she wasn’t feeling well. We ended up heading to the doctor the next morning and found out she indeed was sick.

I think this scenario is very similar to what we sometimes do in our classrooms with students.  How many times have we taught a lesson and had a feeling there were a few students who didn’t get the concepts?  They, in essence, weren’t on their game.  Yet we ignored what our gut told us and continued onward to new concepts rather than taking the time to figure out what was wrong, and then taking steps to make sure the students learned.  Consider me guilty as charged.  When I taught a particular concept, I often knew which students “got it” and which ones didn’t.  Yet I sometimes didn’t do anything about it because I chose to ignore the symptoms.  The signs that the struggling students weren’t progressing were there.  I chose not to listen to my intuition and instead press onward.

Why did I do this?  Honestly, I did this because I didn’t know how to sequence my lessons to allow for re-teaching of a particular concept while still staying on target with the curriculum pacing expectations of the district.  If the unit was to be taught in 8 days, then I taught it in 8 days and moved on.  Instead, I should have taught it in fewer days, formatively assessed my students along the way, and then used the data from the formative assessments to re-teach or pull skills groups. If I went back to the classroom now with the knowledge I have today, I would definitely be a different teacher.

So I challenge you to reflect on your teaching (or, if you are an administrator, on what your teachers are doing) and ask yourself if you are paying attention to the symptoms students exhibit before they turn into a bigger issue, or if you are just ignoring the symptoms all together and hoping for the best.  If you are doing the latter, think about how you will start paying attention to these signs.  Are you going to give small formative assessments to help you diagnose?  If so, how will you make sure students are involved in the formative assessment process?  Are you going to involve students in analyzing assessment data? Will you ask them to set goals they can achieve?

Don’t ignore the symptoms your student show in the classroom.  Develop a plan and then work the plan.

The success of your students depends on it.

Photos:

The extra mile by kkimpel on Flickr

64/365 Ignorance by mellyjean on Flickr

Waiting for Time to Pass by Orange42 on Flickr

With the busy schedule I keep, it is often difficult to find time for my own professional development.  That’s why I was excited to have the opportunity to hear Dr. Anthony Muhammad speak about Transforming School Culture, the topic of his new book, right in my own backyard.  After a few days to digest my learning, I can’t help but reflect on what I heard.

Dr. Muhammad’s message is one that targets district administrators, building administrators, teacher leaders, leadership teams, and teachers.  Through his research, he identifies the four types of educators and their goals (20).  The goal of Believers, the first type of educator, is academic success of every student.  Tweeners seek organizational stability.  Survivors look out for their own emotional and mental survival.  Finally, Fundamentalists seek to maintain the status quo.  As I was listening to him deliver his message, I began to see faces of many different folks I have encountered at some point in my educational career who fit into each of these categories.  It is easy to do because Dr. Muhammad delivers a compelling message (and if you don’t have the opportunity to hear him speak, the book carries the same message).

When I was a teacher, I always wondered how to combat colleagues I now know are Fundamentalists by Dr. Muhammad’s definition.  These are folks who resist change at every turn because it upsets the status quo.  These folks do not want to have anything challenge their comfort zones and usually find some way to derail initiatives.  These are the folks who have something negative to say when a new initiative is suggested.  You know the kind—the ones who always start a sentence with, “Yeah, but…”  What I liked about Dr. Muhammad’s message was that he gave strategies to use when combating these folks in the heat of the moment—and these strategies can be used by anyone from a teacher to a superintendent.   Though the strategies seem very simple to implement and are very similar to the LAST philosophy I often use, I can think of numerous situations where I have sat by and let a Fundamentalist make a statement without challenging it.  Why did I do that?  I didn’t challenge what was said because I didn’t see an immediate need to create friction between me and a colleague.  However, Dr. Muhammad has reminded me that I should never let comments from Fundamentalists go unchallenged.

“Do-so is more important than say-so.”

–Pete Seeger

One other big piece of learning is the idea that I as a leader have control of how many Fundamentalists I have on my staff.  If I am clear with explaining why a particular initiative is important and if I have built strong relationships with staff members, I will have addressed the concerns of a large majority of Fundamentalists.  I was a in a situation at one point where the leader did not take the time to build relationships before making drastic changes in the school and let’s just say the leader didn’t last very long.  Just as we preach the value of strong relationships between our teachers and students, it is just as important for leaders to have strong relationships with their staff members.

Why else are we in this business if we don’t believe in the power of relationships?

Photos:

Through a child’s eye by DownTown Pictures on Flickr

Picture by Hiddenson on Flickr

I am fortunate to be able to say I’ve had several great role models over my career in education. I could go on and on talking about each of them, and maybe someday I will.  Today, however, I want to focus on one in particular, Nancy Mooney, particularly how she made an impact on the way I think about school improvement planning.

You see, Nancy Mooney is the first person who put everything about School Improvement Planning (I’ll use SIP for short) in perspective for me. It wasn’t until learned her model for school improvement that I realized just how important alignment is to the success of the curriculum and instruction in your school district. Nancy was the leader of all things teaching and learning in my district prior to me even coming here.  I was fortunate to meet Nancy through a professional development opportunity in a district in which I previously worked.  Nancy completely changed my perspective of the school improvement process for the better, and I am fortunate I had the opportunity to learn from this great educator.

If you haven’t read Align the Design (2008), written by Nancy and her colleague, Dr. Ann Mausbach, you should have it on a shelf in your professional library. No wait, you should first actively read it and THEN have it on a shelf in your personal library.  This book contains a plethora of information relating to the school improvement process, including the following message of mine from the perspective of a leader in curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

So what does alignment mean? True alignment means your school’s/district’s mission, vision, goals, objectives, strategies, action steps, professional development, and supervision align with one another. From the beginning, you must have objectives in your School Improvement Plan that align to the school’s/district’s mission and vision. Then, you must design a data-driven school improvement plan that meets the district’s needs. Where the rubber hits the road, though, is in the professional development and the ensuing supervision. Do you as the leader of your school/district strategically plan professional development days that align with your SIP, or is there no theme or purpose to topics of those sessions? In my opinion, the quickest way to lose staff support is to provide scatter-shot PD that makes no sense and doesn’t align to what they know is important to the success of the school. (FYI–I plan to write another post discussing professional development because I believe it deserves its own audience.)

So the professional development happens. Then what? For school leaders, it’s time for supervision. Leaders should expect implementation of what is learned in professional development. Why else would you spend time learning it? If it is important enough to release students early from school or even keeping students home for a day so your teachers have time to learn together, then it certainly should be important enough to be implemented in classroom practice.  Supervising the implementation of professional development can be an easy task to do if the previous steps have been followed and everything is aligned properly. Teachers will implement what is learned in professional development if they understand why they are learning it and if it is relevant to what they do everyday. As a district leader, I hold building administrators accountable by expecting to see evidence of PD implementation when I’m in their building walking through classrooms. I talk with teachers. I look for what has been learned in PD being implemented, and I ask students questions because I want to hear them tell me what they are learning in their classes.

Think about it this way, as principals we don’t allow teachers to teach whatever they want and disregard the Board-approved curriculum, do we? Of course we do not. We supervise our staff to ensure we are teaching what is expected. The same should be said for school improvement plans.  If our Board of Educations expect us to develop plans to improve our schools, it is our job as leaders to ensure it is properly aligned and then implemented.

Photos:

B & R by Rosh PR on Flickr

you know it’s true… by McBeth on Flickr

As the school year starts for so many teachers across the country, it also means there are first days of school for our new teachers entering the profession.  Many districts, including my own, have new teacher professional development sessions before the school year begins to help each new staff member get started on the right track.  Although these are good at helping new teachers develop classroom management plans, room arrangements, syllabi, and first day of school lesson plans, nothing can replace the “real deal”—the first day of school.

I remember my first day of teaching:  I had my new outfit, my new “teacher bag”, and my lesson plans were filled with activities to engage my students.  I was excited.  I couldn’t sleep the night before.  I wanted to ignite the interests of my students into the world of Chemistry so much that I would inspire them to enter the world of education themselves when they graduated.

My first day went quite well.  Students were engaged in activities so much the time seemed to fly by.  My classroom procedures avoided discipline problems.  I was on top of the world…until I was asked by the lunch ladies for my STUDENT ID so I could get lunch!  It gave them quite a chuckle when I showed them my STAFF ID card.  Yes, you are right, I was carded in my school lunch line on the first day of school!

All new teachers should have a veteran teacher they can lean on who has a passion for students and their content area/grade level.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the best example when I was a first year teacher.  I had a mentor assigned to me, but he was in his final year of teaching and ready for retirement.  Although he was a great guy, he wasn’t necessarily interested in helping me with my lessons or to collaborate with me on upcoming units.  To top it off, because I was the new person in the department, my room wasn’t near any other department members.  I got the leftover room near the commons area.  I didn’t feel like part of the department, just the new girl with the room away from my department colleagues and close to the lunchroom.

Too often, it is easy to expect that our new staff members are doing well by themselves.  I can see where that can happen. After all, this is the first time they’ve had a classroom all to themselves—it’s like when we first get our driver’s license and Mom and Dad are no longer riding in the passenger seat.  However, just like a parent does with a teenager who gets their license, we as veteran educators must continually engage with our new staff members to ensure they are on the right track.  Are they struggling with lessons?  Can they manage their classroom?  Do they know the members of their department? Have they had their first discipline problem?  We owe it to our students to ensure our new teachers get a good start to their careers.

So even though school has started and you may be very busy with your own work, don’t forget the new face down the hall or across the lunch table from you.  Principals, have you stopped into the classrooms of your new teachers to check in on them?  Teachers, have you had an early morning chat with a new colleague over a cup of coffee in their classroom?  Coordinators, have you sent an e-mail to a new colleague to see if there is anything you can do for them?  We should never underestimate the power of a friendly face…and a hug never hurts.

Photos:

Portrait of the apple as a young man by mkrigsman on Flickr

Mugged by Jasmic on Flickr

Day 82:  Working with another teacher by Old Shoe Woman on Flickr

Because my area of work lies heavily in the world of curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional development, I feel as though I’m always in the middle of a pendulum swing.  You may ask yourself, “Why doesn’t she just get out of the way of the pendulum?”  I wish I could.

The fact is, the educational world is full of examples where we move from one extreme to another without maintaining much balance.  For example, when I was a classroom teacher I can remember state assessment results coming back one August, and as we sat as a department and deciphered the data there was one issue that we thought stood out to us:  our kids just didn’t know how to answer constructed response questions. It had to be that we didn’t teach our students how to correctly answer a constructed response question that explained the poor results, right?  So what did we do?  We spent the next school year “constructed responsing” (yes, I used it as a verb) our students to death.  No need to give them assessments with a variety of questions.  Nope.  They knew how to answer those types of questions.  We needed to work on the constructed response ones because they were the issue.  Our results said it, right?

I don’t have to tell you what happened the next year when the test results came back.  You can infer.  This is just one of many examples of how we sometimes swing the pendulum from one extreme to another in education without giving much thought to maintaining balance.  It happens with curriculum when we believe we should throw out a particular piece of the content because it is irrelevant only to find out the next year we should be emphasizing it.  It happens in instruction, it happens in professional development…really, I could bore you with more and more examples but you are already thinking of your own as you read this post.

I have the pleasure of working with several top-notch teachers and administrators in my district.  I learn so much from my daily interactions with them.  One of my colleagues this week reminded me of the need for balance (and thus, inspired this post) when he wrote this on our District’s Literacy Ning.  I will hand it to my colleague, he took a leap when he decided to write this for all of his peers to read and discuss.  I admire his willingness to step out and make an observation when he thought his team was heading toward another extreme swing of the pendulum.  He could have just sat back and did nothing.  Instead, he started an open dialogue with his colleagues.  You can read the open conversation that occurs after the post.  What he did was spark a conversation that will undoubtedly continue throughout the next few weeks beyond the walls of any particular school building because we have teachers from across our large district communicating with one another via this site.  Through this conversation, our professional development leaders can see first-hand the impressions of the staff and what exactly they as PD leaders need to provide in the next session to help answer the staff’s questions.

So what does all of this mean to me as a leader?  One of my personal challenges this year is to limit emphasizing the newest, the latest, and the greatest before first making sure I’m maintaining a balance in my expectations.  As a leader I need to be cautious, but explicit when stating expectations for implementation of curriculum or instructional models.   Just like in the classroom, folks need to know the “why” before they will really attach themselves to the “what”.  I am challenging myself to be clear and concise when stating expectations, while at the same time making sure I also build background schema so my colleagues understand why I have the expectations I do.  Otherwise, it will be perceived as just one more pendulum swing in education.

Photos:

100 Year-old Clock (1) by Tai Toh on Flickr

I admit it.  I was not on the Twitter bandwagon from the beginning.  I remember the first time I heard about Twitter.  One of the principals I work with was talking about how a small group of teachers in her building were using Twitter to share information during the school day.  I thought, “neat,” and went on my way.  I didn’t think about how Twitter could impact what I do.  I never gave it a second thought for quite a while.

I then began hearing about Twitter on the radio on my drive to work.  The disk jockeys on the morning show I listen to were always talking about what they were tweeting in the evenings or over the weekend.  Again, I didn’t think much about how it could impact me.  I though it was simply a social networking tool, and I was “too busy” to be involved in a social network.

Then my husband got a Twitter account.  He started to follow his favorite sports athletes and celebrities and then a few of his friends.  He had a blast sending out tweets about what was happening in our family or in his world of sports.  (For those of you who haven’t met my husband, he is full of 140 character 1-liners–he and Twitter are a perfect marriage.)  He would always have something to share with me every night about what he learned from Twitter.  That was when I finally gave in.  I started my own account.

Before I started my account, though, I made a promise to myself.  I was going to use this to expand my personal learning network (although at the time I didn’t even know what PLN stood for).  I wanted to learn from other educators and educational leaders across the world.  I wanted to expand my horizons.  So, I started by following a colleague of mine in my district who was already well-connected on Twitter.  He was a great help to me (still is) and I took his suggestions as to who I should follow right off the bat.  I then started looking at who they followed and followed them, too.  Before I knew it I had a very nicely well-rounded group of folks to follow.

I can say without a doubt I am so glad I decided to take the plunge.  Because of the folks I follow, I see Twitter as a professional development tool more than anything.  Do I follow a few celebrities?  Sure (I’m a foodie, so it isn’t uncommon to see me following someone associated with recipes and great food).  However, the majority of the folks I follow are all related to education in some way and have great information they share.  In the 3 months I’ve been on Twitter, the amount of reading I have completed has at least doubled because I receive so much information from my PLN.  I learn something new daily, and I love having one place to go to get the latest and greatest information in education.  I also have found that I started connecting even deeper with some of my own colleagues who are on Twitter.  It isn’t uncommon to see chatter between us in the evenings as we discuss a particular topic.  That could never happen during a regular work day because we are all quite busy doing our respective jobs.

Leave it to my husband to get me to jump off the cliff and get into Twitter.  It is one of the many great things he has convinced me to do.  I am forever changed as a school leader thanks to my personal learning network and I cannot wait to see what the future holds.

Photos:

Brothers putting my retired cellphones to good use by Sean Drellinger on Flickr

154/365…A jump of faith by Desiree’ Delgado on Flickr