Questions to consider. How much time do you spend in quadrant #4? Actually, track your time for a day and see what quadrant you spend most of your working day. I know today I have spent way too much time in quadrant #4, which is not good for the organization I work for, the people I work with, or me. How…
The Board President of IU8, Tom Bullington, and I have a great working relationship. I consider him as much as an education leader as I am. He shared something with me yesterday when he and I met for lunch that will show you why he is an education leader. To set the stage for what I am going to share,…
Learner-centered leaders want to get things done. Creating the conditions in which the school system starts to focus more on the learner is incredibly rewarding. It is also complicated. Failure to realize your dreams for your school can happen if you are not careful. Avoid these two pitfalls while leading change in your school, and you will increase your chance…
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. –John Dewey In the first post in this blog series, I claimed that there are two purposes of schooling: babysitting and high school sports. In today’s post, I want to envision a world where schooling…
Ripping the Band-Aid Off This post builds off an earlier post entitled “The Old and New Story of Education and Schooling.” Over the next few blog posts, I will develop my ideas further. I am going to preface my thesis by saying that I am optimistic about the direction of learning and education. I believe we are heading in the…
A Story This week I had the honor of participating in a dissertation defense (congratulations Dr. Jim Hollis!). The topic of his research was chronic absenteeism. Dr. Hollis interviewed young adults who were chronically absent when they were in school which means they missed more than 18 days of school in one year. The stories of their lives, and why…
In my last post, I discussed the importance of developing your leadership philosophy and the first four questions to get you started. In this post, I will share with you the final seven questions that will help you create your own leadership philosophy. What do you have to learn? The next three questions help build your learner-centered leadership philosophy by…
I had the pleasure to sit down with a group of OUTSTANDING elementary teachers last week. I periodically meet with this team for a reality check. In my position, it is easy to become too “theoretical”. As a school leader, you can’t forget that the decisions you make actually have to be implemented by teachers! I appreciate meeting with this…
Let the handwringing begin. I read today about the shock that “studies” are showing that students are “falling behind” as a result of remote learning. Really? Do you need to do a study to have this revelation? Instead of a study, just ask any educator or parent and you would have found out that students are not learning at the…
The political world today is filled with two political parties that are in a race to the bottom. There is no guiding philosophy in either party for the betterment of average American citizens. Platitudes and elitists mumblings from both the right and the left “don’t put supper on the table” as my grandfather would say. I am sickened by the…