The #1 Thing You MUST Give Teachers BEFORE School Starts

Each year, leaders make their plans for school improvement, and this is typically how it goes. Set goals, determine action steps,  find new resources and training everyone before school starts.  Have additional meetings to ensure everyone knows everything to make this a great start to the year, and then give teachers time to work.

While every bit of this is extremely important, all of the meetings and trainings can leave teachers with a whole lot of things to do and not a lot of time to do them all. If we want teachers to be highly successful with our initiatives, there is one thing they definitely want and we must give them at the beginning of the school year. 

Time to Process and Apply

Yes, we need to take time to welcome back our people and celebrate our progress.  We need to take time for team-building, but we also need to remember that with every piece of training, they need time to process all of the new information we want them to know. While meetings and trainings are invaluable, so is time to collaborate with peers.  Even more important is the time teachers need to take information back to their rooms so they can make a plan to apply that information. Time spent in training is wasted if we don’t give time for teachers to work both together and alone to process the information and make a plan to implement it.

Furthermore, we can’t expect teachers to process multiple days of training of new and complex content. If we want them to be successful, it is best use of their time and our resources, if beginning of school year activities provide teachers deep learning about one or two things rather than multiple things. Additionally, if we believe whole group instruction is just one component of learning for kids, we must believe the same about adults and their learning. Teachers need the gradual release of responsibility in their learning also. They need staff development time dedicated to collaborative learning with their team and time for independent learning to take the learning gained from whole group and collaborative learning and determine how best to implement what they have learned. 

If we want teachers to be successful this year, we must give them TIME. We must structure professional learning time that values teachers more than it values content. At the end of the day when teachers consider the learning needs of their kids first, the content usually takes care of itself. The same is true schools considering the needs of their teachers first and the content we want them to learn second. At the start of this school year, value your teachers by valuing their learning time. 

6 Steps to Becoming a Really Good School Right Now

The school year is upon many of us, and we’re all feverishly working to make our schools the best they can be for all kids. All educators want their schools to be really, really good, but wanting something to be good and taking the critical steps to make it happen are two totally different things. If you really want your school to be great, you have to really want to work hard to make your dreams become your reality.

6 Steps to Becoming a Really Good School.

Relationships

People make schools great when they focus on building strong relationships among and between leaders, teachers, students, and parents.  When these relationships are strong, open, honest, supportive, and ultimately focused on what's best for all kids, schools stand a great chance of becoming great. 

Expectations

In schools of excellence, expectations are high, tight and consistent for all kids but also for all educators, and what's really important is that these high expectations remain high, tight, and consistent all year long. 

Accountability

Expectations can only remain high when every person in the organization stays really committed to them by holding everyone accountable. Without accountability, high expectations wither away to mere hopes and dreams. 

Leadership

If you really want your school to be excellent, a culture of leadership exists where every employee from the principal to the custodian is a leader of some aspect of the school program, and they lead their area by inspiring and teaching everyone how to get better every day.

Learning

Your school will never become really good until every adult becomes a learner and a model of learning for everyone around them. We can’t expect a students to become learners if the adults who influence them aren’t learners first. 

Yearning

Really good schools never settle for the status quo, and they don’t lean on last year’s success. They yearn for even better results, a more supportive student environment, and a better and more effective way of doing things for the benefit of all students. 

Do You Really Want to be Really Good?

The fact of the matter is that we all want the same thing, but the really good schools turn their aspirations into actualities. They turn their why’s into why nots, and they do it as a unified team of educators. 

What ideas listed above will you take advantage of to make your school really good this year?

How to Tell if your School has a Pronoun Problem

Missions are realized through the actions in the building rather than words plastered on the wall. Visions can become realities, but they can also become nightmares as well. Goals are reached by people who believe in the power of teamwork and are also missed by teams who get cause in traps of selfishness.

We know this to be true, so how can we prevent our organizations from moving backwards?

Dig deeper into the words used in your organization. 

Actions often follow our words, which are shaped by our thoughts. Many times our thoughts are positively and negatively influenced by those around us as well as by the words our ears consume in the building and our eyes absorb through social media. If you  think about it, those words enter our brains and the negative ones will impact our works if we fail to filter them appropriately. To determine if this is a problem in your school, a key indicator can possibly be revealed in how and when we use our pronouns and possessive pronouns in our daily work.  

Does your School have a Pronoun Problem?

Teams that win use power pronouns. They say:

• My and I when they own it
• You and your through the lens of support,
• We, our and ours when they remind everyone that we’re all on the same team in both good and bad times. 
• He, She, They, His, Her or Their to identify where both problems and solutions are located,
• This, that, these, and those to elevate strengths and identify struggles. 

Teams that lose use blame pronouns. They say 

• My and I only when they succeed 
• You and your when they fail and need others to blame 
• We, our and ours only when there’s a team success,
• He, She, They, His, Her or They to identify where problems are,
• This, that, those, and these when frustration mounts about kids. 

Which Pronouns are Most Prevalent in your School?

Often times, the pronoun problem is not pronounced among the school as a whole, but there are always pockets of blame pronouns as well as exemplars who always use power pronouns. The job of leaders, both campus and teacher leaders, is to confront and counteract blame pronouns with a reminder of why the team exists, and that problems and frustration can be overcome when the principle pronouns become we, us and our, instead of the divisiveness of mine and yours. Only then will the words positively impact the actions of the organization. 

The Disconnect You Need, So You can Connect to What Matters

In this fast paced world driven by social media, texting, or instant communication, there is an ever growing urge to be "connected".  Finding the latest information, checking your feed, checking your other feed, and then checking your stories can consume us if we're not careful. The dopamine hits increase with every like, love, comment or retweet, and they push us to be evermore connected to the people inside our screens.

There is however an inherent problem that comes with this urge to connect, and that is it disconnects us from the people outside those screens that we stare at.  Each time we connect to one thing, we disconnect from everything else. You have a choice.  Connect with people inside your screen or outside your screen.  The decision can be influenced by this question.  Are you connecting with the most important things in this world most of the time?

Chances are that if you are connected to your device a lot, you're doing that at the cost of connecting with people who matter most to you:  your spouse, your children, your friends, and your colleagues.  So what's most important in your life?   If it's in your device, it might be time to reassess your priorities. 

Better yet, how much of life are you missing because you are so connected?  After all, the purpose of life is to make a significant impact on those we are closest to first, and everyone else second.  D

This summer, disconnect so you can connect to what matters most.

6 Exit Tickets to Improve your Leadership

Exit tickets have been proven to elicit formative assessment data that drives instruction. At the end of a lesson, an exit ticket is a quick check to see which students learned and which students are still struggling. Then the data from yielded from the exit ticket is leveraged to make adjustments to the next day’s lesson.

Well, it makes good sense to employ exit tickets as much as possible to strengthen instruction, so wouldn’t it make even better sense if leaders used exit tickets to strengthen their leadership?  After all leadership is nothing more than teaching folks how to get better at what they do. 

Think about this.

• We have meetings. Are they getting it?  
• We have trainings. Did they learn it?
• We send communication. Do they understand it?

If you answered these questions with “I don’t know”, then the answer for some folks in your organization will be a definite no. To strengthen your leadership, here are 6 strategies to use exit tickets to strengthen your leadership by knowing if your people are with you.

6 Exit Tickets for Leaders

1. Sticky Note Feedback - Provide sticky notes to your staff and at the end of the meeting or training, have them leave you with information that they don’t understand or need more clarification. 
2. Hand signs - Quickly poll the group with a thumbs up or down or fist of 5 (rating scale) to gauge their comfort with new information. 
3. Google Form - This tech tool allows you to get specific information from individuals through ratings or responses. 
4. Mentimeter - CLICK HERE for a great tech tool that participants can anonymously leave ratings, feedback or questions. 
5. Plickers - CLICK HERE for a tech-tool in the form of a paper-based QR code that participants can answer multiple choice or true/false questions while you can scan the entire room with your cell phone. 
6. One & One - Before people leave the meeting, give a note card to participants  and ask them to write down one positive and one question or concern they have from your meeting or training. 

At the end of the day, your leadership is based entirely on how much your followers gain from your influence. You will never truly know your impact until you ask for help from those you serve. Exit tickets are a quick and powerful way to both gauge their knowledge and comfort as well as your effectiveness as a communicator and leader. 

7 Serves of a Super Leader

Leadership is service. It’s influence. It drives cultural and structural change. If you get down to the heart of leadership, it is the galvanizing force that permanently shapes an organization.

So what is the driving force of leadership?  At the end of the day, it is how the leader serves. Now you may be thinking, “Not every leader serves”.  Well actually every leader does serve. It’s just that some are self-serving, while others are not. Here’s what I mean. 

Weak leaders serve:

• Themselves first and others if it feels right. 
• The status quo. 
• At the cost of customers. 
• Safety and easiness,
• Negativity 

Super leaders serve:

• Others first and themselves last. 
• A quest for continuous improvement all in an effort to avoid the comfort and stagnation of the status quo. 
• Customers as if it were an investment in the organization,
• Innovators and a better way of doing things
• High expectations and accountability,
• Optimism to every one,
• A higher calling. 

Weak leaders serve at the cost of the organization’s future, but super leaders alter the current trajectory of that organization forever. The difference between those two leaders always comes down to one question. 

Are you here to serve yourself or everyone else?

7 Escape Routes from the Silo Syndrome

The other day I was driving the beautiful roads of west Texas, and I came upon a row of silos.  During the summertime, silos are busy being filled with the bountiful harvest on their route to the market and eventually into our grocery cart.  If you think about it, silos are the final resting place for once thriving, growing seeds.

Are You in a Silo?
In our work, getting stuck in our very own silo is safe.  It is comfortable, but we must remember that no growth can occur in a silo.  No meaningful iteration of our work can occur simply because we close off our minds and therefore ideas to the possibility of purposeful improvement. 

Silos are vacuums of isolation, pure and simple, and too often, people withdraw to a silo and limit their life from discovering its true purpose.  You were built for something amazing, but you won't find out what it is if you spend your life in a silo.

Escaping the Silo Syndrome
Excellent people make sure that they escape the allure of the silo syndrome, which is the purposeful decision to isolate, withdraw, and avoid learning from others in order to save face.  These people escape their personalized silo in the following ways:

• learning from others,
• showing their flaws to others,
• asking for help,
• observing,
• challenging the status quo,
• fighting for more effective and efficient ways of doing,
• sharing their excellence with others.

Have you Escaped your Silo?

Safe is easy, but that's not what you were built for.  Silos offer comfort, but it is in the form of novacaine.  Step out of your personal silo.  Stop seeking comfort, and embrace your "uncomfort" zone.  Your work and those you work with will thank you for it.