This is a blog about my life, education, challenging discussions and what I learn. The mission and goal of this blog is to promote the sharing of ideas and resources to improve student performance.
Tonight I sat in a classroom for my doctoral program and thought that it was going to be just another class. I was wrong. With a tremendous thank you to Dr. Craig Larson I had the experience of a lifetime. I can honestly say I am changed forever from this experience.
I had the opportunity to sit in a room of superintendents, two of I knew, three I did not, and just listen and ask questions. It was amazing. The questions and answers were unscripted and unfiltered which made for an experience like no other. Let me explain something to you, I love learning, but this experience sent me to a whole new level. It was just amazing.
In the interest of sharing I also tweeted every memorable statement made by the panelists and compiled them below. The whole experience opened my eyes and really made me so excited about great leadership in education. It excited me to no end that I have chosen this profession. This experience confirmed to me that this is what I want my life to be about.
We have an obligation as administrators to help struggling teachers. Troops notice how the generals treat the wounded. -S.Lawrence #edchat
What "red lights" have you had to run in your tenure in ed leaderhsip? #edchat
I really don't think you can lead without running every red light. -K.Adams #edchat
Don't see as red lights, every decision "what needs to happen to align our work so they can be who they want to be."-S.Compton #edchat
They might need to be a nurse, they might need to be a brain surgeon not every one needs to be a principal or a teacher. -S.Compton #edchat
Sometimes good is not good enough, we need great. -S.Lawrence #edchat
We need OUTSTANDING leaders, teachers, and staff for the value of our children's lives -S.Lawrence #edchat
As a Supt. I over-invest in my school board. -S.Lawrence #edchat #cpchat
I have a preference to work with intelligent people. -S.Lawrence #edchat #cpchat
Supt.: Never take a job when it's a 4-3 vote. You need unanimous support. -K.Adams #edchat #cpchat
Supt: board meeting takes an hour, that's too long, I've been communicating about whats going on, they should know -K.Adams #edchat #cpchat
I was told elected boards don't work, it must be your job to communicate with your board, then it will. -K.Adams #edchat #cpchat
Were reculturing what we are doing. Good can be the enemy of great. -M. Chappelow #edchat #cpchat
When you hire good people there is a mass of people asking: "why do we do it that way?"-M.Chappelow #edchat #cpchat
We're growing, we are getting less money through AV, there's the crunch in education -M.Chappelow #edchat #cpchat
When a district loses trust, you have to gain it back, it's emotional process -M.Chappelow #edchat #cpchat
I like to plant seeds, things don't more fast in education. -M.Chappelow #edchat #cpchat
Having an attitude of proactively planning for the future is my key to success. -M.Chappelow #edchat #cpchat
Reflection:
Reading back through these statements I try to grasp exactly what happened tonight. I want to say I think the 25 students that to the opportunity to meet, question, and learn form these amazing leaders have changed permanently. We learned valuable lessons, but I think more than anything, we learned about hope. Hope for a greater education for the next generation. We were blessed to have this opportunity to learn from such AMAZING leaders and get a small glimpse of what being a true leader means.
Some of my favorite comments from tonight include:
Learn everything you can learn, touch everything you can touch, in order to learn to prepare you for educational leadership.-K.Adams
As an aspiring administrator this validated my path and reminded me that there is no bad learning experience, there is always something I can learn and take away.
Sometimes good is not good enough, we need great. -S.Lawrence
I think about this everyday. That lesson that I did last year is not good enough for my kids this year. I need to improve what I do everyday. One of my favorite quotes is "Never let good stand in the way of being great."
When I have a challenge I like to look at what are my chances for success -M.Chappelow
This goes back to my blog post on solving problems in schools. Every time I'm faced with an obstacle the bottom-line to accomplishing the task at hand is in your perception of the obstacle. Is it a problem that requires a solution, a constraint that I will have to live with moving forward, or an opportunity to improve the organization. I will always consider an obstacle as an opportunity to learn, grow, and get better at what I do everyday.
If you hire thoroughbreds, you need to let them be thoroughbreds. It takes talent to manage talent. -S.Compton
WOW! Powerful statement. If we hire great teachers, how can we as educational leaders inspire, motivate and support them to be all that they can be (do I have to pay Army for that statement?)? I love this quote because it shows the importance of human resources and the role it plays on the development of a great school.
FInally, I leave you with a GREAT song/video, thank you to Dr. Lawrence who mentioned it tonight.
What’s wrong with PD? (this is the crabby section so just skip over this :-))
To borrow a phrase from business experts like Seth Godin and Mark Hurst: professional development “is broken.” (for more on things that are broken check out: http://goodexperience.com/tib/) Professional development (PD) is ineffective and inefficient, Dr. Reeves believes there are a number of reasons that that has occurred. First of all, PD is designed in the same format as an autopsy. PD is often designed as “a procedure that is undoubtedly filled with data but rarely improves the health of the patient” (Reeves). This means that the information and activities that are completed and deemed as PD really have no real translation to students or student achievement. For instance, the data from the MAP test does not get returned to the school until the following year. This gap in time makes PD focused on the MAP assessment as effective as an autopsy. There are no tangible ways to translate that specific data into a usable and vital resource to plan professional development.
PD is often planned and organized in too short of a time period. I often overhear administrators say, “What do you want to do with the February professional development day?” The other replies, “I don’t know, we’ll figure it out in January.” This lack of focus on the program through a holistic approach leaves the teachers without the ability to make a lasting change in teacher or student performance. The implementation of PD without an overall idea of where the staff is and where they are going creates an ineffective use of time and resources.
PD lacks purpose. There are very little ties from professional development to performance in the classroom. There may be new ways to do something, new strategies to use, but they are often presented in isolation. Concepts and skills do not build, loop, or cycle in order for teachers to create lasting change. Professional development without purpose and ties to student performance has no impact.
PD introduces too many new programs. The law of initiative fatigue states that “when the number of initiatives increases while time, resources, and emotional energy are constant, then with each new initiative—no matter how well conceived or well intentioned—will receive fewer minutes, dollars, and ounces of emotional energy than its predecessors” (Reeves). WOW! Powerful statement. If you relate this to juggling, imagine that there is a limit to how many balls a juggler can keep in the air at one time. Educational initiatives are much like the balls in the air. How can we as administrators continue to put more balls in the air with each professional development day and just hope teachers get better from it? The lack of focus on a specific measurable objective yields no overall response. As leadership continues to add more and more items to the workload of educators, continues to under utilize systems thinking into the overall plan, this causes each new task to decrease in effectiveness. Eventually faculty and staff arrive at the point where nothing successful is happening and it is hard to determine why.
Research shows that the “largest effects were found for programs offering between 30 and 100 hours spread out over 6-12 months.” (Darling-Hammond, 2009)
“If you were to decide in the months ahead to substitute high-impact learning for meetings, assemblies, and workshops, you may decide that you are not giving up very much after all.” (Reeves)
How do we fix it? (YES, All the answers!!!!!)
First of all, choose a topic. Reeves states that the topics can include improving teaching, curriculum, assessment or leadership. He says that it must be something determined through a comprehensive needs assessment. Then, while implementing this plan, administration must focus on three aspects of PD. The first is student learning and how the actions of PD reinforce or seek to improve student achievement. The second is that there must be rigorous measurement of adult decisions. This means that administrators examine not only what teachers know, but what they do every day in their craft. Finally, there must be a focus on people and practices. We, as administrators, must focus our energy on the individual needs of the teacher as a learner and examine his/her practice to see if there are changes being made as a result of PD.
Reeves states that successful PD has 9 characteristics:
1.Comprehensive needs assessment – “Plans contain evidence of school leadership decision regarding the use of time, assignment of staff, and allocation of resources that were directly related to student needs.”
2.Inquiry process – causal relationship is determined between teaching and leadership practices and student results
3.Prioritization – six or fewer priorities
4.Specificity – directly related to academic expectations for students, grade levels, skills, and individual students
5.Measurability – objective statements can be made about progress, or lack thereof, to the achievement of goals
6.Achievability – goals were established to close gaps in there to five years
7.Relevance – represented as urgent, critical needs and are clearly aligned with needs analysis process
8.Timeliness – specific dates, seasons, months, etc. for assessment and data collection
9.Monitoring – data to be monitored, along with intervals to examine and reporting progress, student results and professional practices are used
How does this impact the superintendent? "Inspected by number 2."
The role of the superintendent is to be the leading learner in the district. The CEO/superintendent cannot forget that his/her role in education is not only to lead the district but to continue to the role of lead learner for the district. The superintendent should make time to attend professional development, learn what the teachers are learning, and then see the learned skill or concept in action. Similar to the show Undercover Boss on CBS where CEOs go undercover in their own companies, superintendants should do a quality control on how their district personnel are being challenged, improved, and developed to become better.
Every once in a while I will buy a shirt and somewhere on it will be a sticker that says “inspected by number 2” (or some other number). This is equivalent to quality control of the product at hand. That quality control needs to not only come form the person assigned to that responsibility but also seen first hand by the lead learner: the superintendent. Focusing on that role and assisting those within the district in not losing sight of developing teachers and all things that impact student learning will pay off when evaluating the effectiveness of the superintendent. After all, being a successful leader of a district where kids are not learning will make for a very short tenure.
Understanding the law of initiative fatigue is a crucial piece to the success of the district. Being aware of where the staff is as a whole, what they are learning, why they are learning it, and challenging administrators to protect teachers will focus the staff. The focus of the superintendent should always be on improving student achievement through creating the direction/vision of the district and what initiatives are needed based on a thorough needs assessment. Nurturing PD as a crucial piece to the success of the district will allow for a successful tenure as a superintendent.
Seth Godin is a master at creativity in business. He states that this book is free and should be passed on to others. His goal throughout this book is to help others find ways to make their message, their company, and their ideas, catch on, to help the ideas spread like a virus. As leaders in a school district, as the CEO, if we see a vacuum between how things are and how things should be, we must be masters at marketing our own ideas and plans to help fill the vacuum and assist in school district success.
The “ideavirus” is the belief that a concept can spread, like the common cold, throughout your organization. This book analyzes how it spreads, what makes it spread, and what are the pitfalls and opportunities CEOs have in order to assist in the growth of their organization. In this day and age people are more connected than ever. A simple video of a kitten being tickled that someone uploaded earned more than 33 million hits on YouTube. 33 million! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bmhjf0rKe8) This video caught on, it spread like a virus, these concepts/ideas/thoughts are said to be viral. The idea that someone wants to see a video of a kitten being tickled was probably not intended to spawn such an amazing result. The key message here is that many ideaviruses are not intended to spread. The reason why they do is they speak to the key factors that make an ideavirus successful. The key factors to consider when trying to spread an idea like a virus are: velocity, smoothness, sneezers, hives, persistence, vectors, and amplifiers. Each of these key parts plays an important role in spreading an idea. Mistreating or neglecting any of these will cause an idea to fail to spread and the virus to die out. Understanding each of these concepts will also help the CEO to understand why an unintended virus spread and how best to manage or contain grass root movements.
Impact on Superintendent
Just as the CEO of a major company, the superintendent is given the job not only of managing the day-to-day operations of the district but also of setting a course, a vision, for what is to come in the road ahead. It is imperative for the superintendent to focus not only on today while also always preparing the course of tomorrow. In completing this task an important piece of this puzzle is marketing the district as a viable option for community members to support. Just as they say in marketing, one bad review will take over ten thousand positive referrals to refute. We must be cognizant of those we seek positive referrals from and market our district to those people. We must ensure those people, who Seth Godin calls the “sneezers,” continue to have positive interactions and memorable experiences at our schools. A superintendent must be thoughtful about the initiatives the district undertakes. They must work with the central office staff to unify the goal of the initiative, break it into manageable pieces, and surround the organization with the right people to communicate the task ahead. Marketing that initiative is imperative to the success of the idea. Understanding the vacuum the initiative should fill and the medium the message should be communicated through is as important as the idea itself. Creating a catchphrase to ensure that the essential aspects of the idea/intiative are spread to the community (hive) will all help the idea go viral. Justin Bieber is famous. There is no doubt about that, but his rise to stardom was not because of hard work, dedication to his craft, talent agencies, and corporate executives. He was made famous by ordinary people through the website www.youtube.com. What can we learn from this as CEOs? Ultimately, ideas spread. Why do they spread? They spread because there is a need, a vacuum, a desire for people to hear a certain kind of music targeted to a certain population that was not being targeted by music executives. This is what made him famous. As the superintendents we must be aware of those pockets in our community. We must seek to capitalize on those pockets, identify services to alleviate that need so we can continue to serve our community. If we do not do it, people will seek out other resources to fill their needs. As a superintendent we must know the correct medium with which to fill that need which in turn will make for a successful tenure.
We live in a society connected like no others, we no longer have to spread an idea at the hair salon, phone call to phone call, station to station. Ideas spread like virus, they go viral. What can we do as the leaders of our organization to recognize and capitalize on this realization? As the CEO of our organization, superintendents should master the art and science of marketing. How they spread the message of the school district matters. How they gain support from the board and the community, matters. How they develop their district through strategic, focused, planned and unplanned change, matters. Understanding how ideas spread like viruses, who makes them spread, and how to influence the virility of the message can rapidly improve the tenure of a superintendent and the success of the district itself.
