The 2nd 20 Days of Excellence

The 1st 20 days of school are critical to starting your journey to excellence, and now they are coming to an end for many students.  So what does that mean and what is the next step?  That means that what kids have done everyday since the first day of school is now a habit, and the next step is to break bad habits and solidify habits of excellence.  

So What Habits have your Kids Formed?

Do your students have productive habits?  Have the built habits that will lead to excellence, or have they created habits of avoidance?  Do they instinctively jump into a new task with a groan once it is announced, or do their eyes light up because they are conditioned to embrace uncertainty?   The answers to these questions culminate into one question.  

How well did you do at establishing your vision for excellence in the 1st 20 days?

If your vision of excellence is not where you want it to be, that's ok.  In fact, that's great because acknowledging you're not where you want to be means that you want to make meaningful change to get back on the path to excellence.    

The next step to making the 2nd 20 days of school great for all kids is to see what kind of habits have formed with individual students especially those who struggle.   

Source - A Leader's Guide to Excellence in Every Classroom

• Resources - Determine how competent kids are with your resources for learning.  If they don't like the resources or don't know how to use them, that reinforces habits of avoidance.
• Routines - Assess your routines and procedures and determine where students need higher expectations or even accountability from you. 
• Relationships - Identify which students have negative relationships with you, your content or with students in the room.  Relationships are critical to success in learning.
• Engagement - Evaluate where your lesson planning fails to meet struggling students head-on.  The failure to engage specific students guarantees that habits of poor performance that become petrified and therefore unbreakable.
• Rigor - Which content is too challenging for kids?  How can you make it more accessible and ultimately attainable to learn?
• Differentiation - How many minutes of learning are students empowered to chase their learning through intervention and extension?  The answer to this question will lead you to create need learning experiences to reinforce positive learning habits.
• Celebration - What are you celebrating?  Better yet, what are the kids celebrating?  If it's the end of class, it's time to build celebration into your instruction.

The 2nd 20 Days = 1st 20 Days + 1 Focus on Excellence

The 1st 20 Days of school establish the pathway to excellence, but the 2nd 20 days can either accelerate or stall your growth towards excellence.   If we want the next 20 days of school to accelerate growth, we must reflect.  We must brave enough, vulnerable enough and critical of ourselves and our work so that we can find our areas or opportunities for growth (aka weaknesses).  Then and only then will we discover how to make the 2nd 20 Days of School even better than the 1st 20.

Moving from Maximized to Optimized Leadership

Leaders always want to get more done, but does getting more done lead to optimum performance or even ultimate impact.  Seth Godin made a great point in his post "Optimum or Maximized".  Maximum speed is not the same as optimum speed.  So if you apply this idea to leadership, what is the difference between optimized leadership and maximized leadership?

• Maximized - short-term output level of high stress, where parts degrade but short-term performance is high.
• Optimized - the best or most effective use of a situation, opportunity, or resource.
• Leadership - service, influence, the function of a leader, the action of leading a group of people.

Leadership is essentially a vehicle for systemic improvement.  Even the word has a vehicle in it (ship). You can go as fast as you like, but if you're chasing maximum output, your vehicle will overheat and eventually burn up.  Maximized leadership will go faster than optimum leadership, but it will eventually burn the leader out and destroy the organization.

Optimized leadership, on the other hand, can never burn out because this form of leadership optimizes every situation.  It gets the best out of all people.  It makes the most of all time available, and it doesn't waste resources, people or their time either.  If we want optimum organizational performance, leaders should shift their focus from maximum output to optimized performance.  The organization will thank you for it.

The Secret about "Good Data"

Everyone wants "good data", but so often it's rarely found.  The minute you receive low scores, you have "bad data", right?  If you receive high scores, skepticism creeps in, and you doubt if they really knew it at high levels.  Does your data leave you with doubt?

Here's the reality.  Good Data is Fool's Gold.  There's no such thing as "good data".

What we need is VALID DATA

The secret to getting valid data is to create valid assessments.  Think about it.  If you fail to spend time creating assessments that you believe in, you will discount the data it yields and therefore blame the assessment for giving you "bad data" or invalid data.  If you have little involvement creating the assessment and the data is "good", then you will wonder if the assessment truly met the depth and complexity of the standards you wished to assess.  In short the quality of the assessment leads to the validity of the data.  There's no other way around it.

The Secret to Valid Data
Bottom line is there are a few things to consider if you want to move from getting good data to generating valid and actionable data.

1. Know your standards.
2. Create assessment items that assess those standards at the basic, intermediate and advanced level.
3. Provide students a variety of assessment items that require students to transfer their learning in predictable as well as unpredictable situations.
4. Analyze the student data by student by standard by level of proficiency.

At the end of the day, you will never get data that will drive your work with laser-like precision until you create assessments that are intentional, meaningful, and most importantly reliable in driving your response to student learning.  Good data tells you how you did.  Valid data drives you to know what to do next.