A call for help...

In my recent post reflecting on my goals, I shared that one of my goals is to act more like an Instructional Coach than a Supervisor when observing classrooms and providing teachers with feedback. I mentioned this to a member of my Twitter PLN (also co-moderator of the #Educoach twitter chat), Kathy Perret, and she was very interested in this concept.

It has become an idea that we have decided to collaboratively pursue continuing to research and hopefully publish our learning on the concept. But here's where we need your help. If you are a principal or a teacher, please take our surveys. If you know a principal or a teacher, please pass the survey (or this post) on to them. We greatly appreciate your help!

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Reflecting on my goals with staff

Just sharing the Friday Focus post from my Staff Memo blog this week:

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At our Professional Learning Meeting this week I asked you to open up to the front of your Reflection Journals and take 5 minutes to reflect on the goals (2 professional and 1 personal) that you wrote at the beginning of the school year. For this week's Friday Focus, I'm going to put myself "out there" and share my personal reflections on the goals I wrote in my journal for this year (Wondering why I'm sharing this with you? See #1 below...feel free to skip reading this if you're not really interested in my goals).

Professional Goal #1: To model reflection of my professional growth and encourage staff to reflect as well.

One of the most important things any educator can do is reflect on their practice. Great teachers know that you can't just teach the same lessons every year, because your students change. Great teachers often don't follow their lesson plans as written throughout the week, because they are constantly reflecting on how their students responded to the instruction and adapting their plans to their students' needs. Unfortunately, our daily schedules leave us with very little time to reflect...many of us are happy if we can get in 1 personal bathroom break and get our lunch down in just 5 minutes. Despite the challenge of time (that is a challenge for almost anything we want to accomplish), reflection is the key to progress.

"Reflection is the beginning of reform." ~Mark Twain

Reflecting on my goal of reflecting...I have been using my Friday Focus as a means to share my reflections with you each week and also shared the link to my personal/professional blog where I also share my reflections. While blogging sounds quite scary (and I must admit I was hesitant to even share that link with you all), it has become one of my best tools for reflection. If you know me, I cannot write much by hand and prefer to type. In addition, I have quite a high following of other educators on my professional blog that I have gained a great deal of feedback on to help challenge my thinking and gain new ideas.

I had planned on giving staff time to write in reflection journals at the end of each of our professional learning meetings, however, I know that this is something I have forgotten a few times (I will also tell you that closure was one of my weakest areas in the classroom). I loved the idea that someone added in response to this blog of adding a reflection question for you all in my Friday Focus posts and am trying to remember to do that to encourage your reflection as well.

Professional Goal #2: To act more like an instructional coach than a "supervisor"

Before I made the crazy "leap" into administration I worked for one year as an Instructional Coach and absolutely loved it. I loved the time I spent observing teachers, helping them to reflect, planning with them, co-teaching a lesson, etc. During my years here as principal, I have focused on improving my practice of getting into classrooms as much as possible to provide teachers with feedback. Over the past year, I have come to realize how important it is not only to just give you my feedback, but to have conversations with you as an Instructional Coach does.

An Instructional Coach's role is to improve instruction and I don't see my role any differently (I just also happen to have many other duties to fulfill as well). I reflected in a previous post about my classroom visits here and am continuing to find that it is very difficult to find time to talk with teachers after visits and I have to resort to emailing quite often. I am happy to see from my data that I have increased my rate of feedback from 48% to 77% (meaning that for all of my classroom visits since the start of the year I have either given verbal or email feedback 77% of the time):

Feedback rates at the start of October

Feedback rates up until now

Another challenge I have found in my goal of acting more like a coach than a supervisor is that it is hard for some to separate the “evaluator” hat that I do ultimately “wear” as a principal. In a recent chat on twitter on the roles/similarities of coaches and principals, someone asked “How can a principal act as a coach?”

My tweeted response was:

Personal Goal: To make time for myself (reading for pleasure and to exercise 3 times a week)
Well, I already shared with you my reflections on exercise in our staff meeting (I really need to start joining those after school Zumba and pickleball sessions)! I made reading for pleasure a goal, because I often just read professional books and forget that I really enjoy reading for pleasure. I definitely have been doing better with this, however, when I recently told a group of 5th graders that I read 26 books in 2011 they told me “that’s nothing, we read WAY more than that!”

Now, since I just got quite personal with you all, I'm going to resort to one of my coping mechanisms of humor (in the form of an image):

My reflection prompt for you:

If you didn't get the chance to reflect on all of your goals this week, do it NOW!!!

Web 2.0 How do I love you? Let me count the ways...

1. Twitter -Do I really need to explain twitter? Let's just say I couldn't imagine my life without twitter! This is where I learn about how any other tools can help me both personally and professionally.

2. Blogging-I keep this blog for my reflections and professional growth and also maintain a blog for my staff.

3. Google Docs-I love how easy it is to have others contribute to a document or ask someone to review something I've written before submitting it. No more emailing an attachments back and forth. No more losing a document in microsoft word when your computer auto-closes it before saving (google docs auto-saves every few seconds).
Here is a great video clip to see how beneficial google docs can be in your school:


4. Google calendar-this is the first year I've used google calendar and find it extremely useful for my useful for my secretaries to have access to my calendar-they can always see where I'm at and add new appointments to my calendar. Recently after having an issue with our computer lab sign-up on our internal network, we set up a google calendar for staff to sign up this way...for many of our staff it's their first time activating their google account and I'm hopeful that it will lead to many more uses of google apps in our building. My next goal is also for us to create an IEP calendar in our district o we make sure that there are not 2 mtgs scheduled at once that LEA representatives need to be at.

5. Google reader-I love reading blogs online and I no longer have to waste my time checking my favorite blog sites to see if there's a new post...they go straight to my google reader and I check it when I want to see what's in there. Here's a video clip I shared with staff when I showed them google reader at our Tech Tuesday:


5. Diigo -I love that I can access and add to my favorites no matter what device I'm using online. I also enjoy that i can just have the "autobots" search my tags within diigo to find what I'm looking for. There are many features of diigo that I haven't begun to use yet, sharing them in a group for example.

6. Evernote -after having an incident of losing everything in my yellow notepad on my iPad I have become an all the time Evernote user. If you don't have an iPad, you can still use evernote on your computer. It's "in the cloud" so you can access it from any device! I love that's I can organize my notes in notebooks, label them with multiple tags and that I can access the on any device. I recently learned that Evernote has a voice feature that is useful in the classroom, because the teacher could record a student reading, take notes and save it for that student's portfolio or even email the recording with a message to the parents!

7. Pinterest -this has become a new addiction that one of my teachers discovered. Basically Pinterest is a way to search for ideas, but you're just searching on others' bulletin boards and you then create your own bulletin boards of ideas. The teacher that shared this with me said she basically never uses google anymore when she's looking for an idea.

8. Podcasts-I love being able to learn from podcasts while I'm cleaning the house or working out and I have also enjoyed joining in on podcasts recording within the past year. You can find my list of podcasts here.

9. TodaysMeet is basically a chat room you can create and invite anyone in by giving them the link. I recently used this in a staff mtg as a back channel to foster more discussion.

10. Skype - I love to use this for personal and professional use

11. Google + I rarely go to Google +, however, the hangout feature is just like skype, but allows up to 10 people to join for free. There has been a regular group of us in my twitter PLN that organize times to meet in google +hangout (we've discussed the start of the school year, walkthroughs, use of evernote, etc.)

12. Facebook - I pretty much only use facebook to keep in touch with family/friends since we live out of state. I use this to post pictures of my kids so Grandma can still feel connected (it's far easier for me than emailing them out to people).

13. The Principal Center is a new online place for Principals started by Justin Baeder to join for sharing ideas and resources. This month I'm starting a book study there with several other principals. If you want to join, just let me know and I'll send you an invite (you do have to go through a process to verify that you are an administrator).

14. Screencastomatic - I have found it very easy to make quick tutorials that show staff exactly how to do something. No more screenshots/editing to make a handout that gets lost. The screencast stays on my blog and youtube channel for them to access as needed.

15. YouTube - I use YouTube for school video clips and for Screencasts. Last year we were fortunate enough to have a young lady from another country visiting her grandmother over the summer and attended our summer school program. She recently saw our summer school video clip and commented on it that she can't wait to come back to America and join us again this year!

16. Xtranomral -I have not used this, but I certainly love watching what others have made, especially what some of our 4th graders made that you can find here. I have also found some to start out a staff meeting with humor (like a funny one about parent teacher conferences).

17. Bitly.com I love using bitly to shorten web links and to customize them so they aren't just a random assortment of letters/numbers. Here's a screencast I made to show my staff how to use it:



18. Shelfari - I used to use Goodreads to log my books and connect with others that have similar reading interests and find book suggestions, but I wanted to add a "widget" to my blog that shows the most recent books I've read. This isn't to brag (which my husband usually says), but it's actually after attending a conference with Regie Routman---she says it is important for teachers to share with students about themselves as readers and for principals to do the same for their staff. I thought the easiest way would be to have this on my staff blog for when they check my Monday Memo and Friday Focus each week. You can see that it is also on this blog.

19. Pandora - I'm the type of person that needs music to work, so I love being able to access my Pandora account and pick my station (especially since we don't get a radio signal in our school building).

I'm sure that I missed some tool, but as I went through my week, these are the tools I used that help me do my job and continue my learning.

New Year's Reflections, not New Year's Resolutions

Why wait for the New Year to make your resolutions or goals?

Maybe the New Year holiday has been changed for me thanks to being in education and that I get excited for each new year that starts in school on September 1st, but I just don't see the New Year on January 1st as reason to start making resolutions for the new year. If you are a lifelong learner and committed to your profession, then you should always have a set of goals that you are constantly monitoring, reflecting upon and revising.

Each January I have to laugh at how busy the gym is for the first 2 weeks--filled with all the people that decided that this year they are going to get in shape or lose weight. Then after those 2 weeks, the traffic dies down, because it was just a New Year's Resolution hype. (Note-if you are trying to make this your New Year's Resolution, please don't be offended by my take on this. Use this New Year to reflect on why this hasn't worked for you in the past so that it will this year.)

If you google New Year's Resolutions, you will find a multitude of sites that list ways to stick to your new goals. Most of these lists include: make your goals realistic, write them down, tell people (to help hold you accountable), and reward yourself. When you go back to your google search, you will also find many sites that list the top 10 New Year's Resolutions and ideas of how to create your New Year's Resolutions. If you have to do that much work (of searching for ideas) to come up with your new goal, it is my guess that you will not be able to stick with it. You should know in your heart and in your daily life what your goal should be. You need to find ways to make the monitoring of it part of your daily life. I'm not going to tell you how, but I'll tell you how I do.

I use the app Simple Goals to keep track of my personal and professional goals. I keep my professional goals on my iPad (since this is school issued and I use it at school constantly) and my personal goals on my iPod. I'm sure that there are a variety of other great tools out there to use to track your goals, however, I love this one because it is ridiculously simple (hence the title) and it's free! In addition, I have always kept a journal where I add my reflections and notes on my goals, however, I have really done more of that here on my blog and begun using evernote to journal, because I have become almost completely unable to use pen/paper.

I have also tried to model reflecting upon goals for my staff...at the start of the year I shared my personal/professional goals with staff and gave each teacher a journal (actually I bought a variety and they each picked the one they wanted) and gave them time to write their goals for the year-both professional and personal. I have asked teachers to bring these journals to each professional learning meeting and given them a few minutes at the end of each meeting to reflect and write. At the suggestion of one of my teachers, I have also tried to add a reflection prompt to the end of each of my Friday Focus posts for them to reflect/write if they choose. I don't check teacher's journals, so I really don't know how they are being used. Just like anything, I'm assuming that those that those that utilize it get the most out of it. At our next professional learning meeting I am planning to have teachers turn back to their first goals page they wrote at the start of the year to reflect on their goals for this school year and revise as necessary.

Use the New Year Holiday as a time to enjoy time with your family and friends while reflecting on your current goals and ask yourself:
-As you look at your data or method to keep track of your progress, how well are you meeting your goals? If you have no data to look at, then you need to find a method to track your progress.
-Do any of your goals need to be revised? How so?
-What do you need to add to your goals? Remember, if you make this something totally new, you will likely not stick to it. However, if this is your time to finally decide to quit a bad habit or add a new one, make sure that you find a way for this goal to "stick" all year and not die out by January 18th.

Leading the Way with Staff Memos

Just over a year ago I heard Todd Whitaker speak to many principals at the annual AWSA (Association of Wisconsin School Administrators) convention. As always, I left with many great tips to continue leading my school, but the biggest tool I learned about was providing my staff with a weekly memo. Whitaker called it a "Friday Flash" or "Friday Focus" and is used to share best practices with staff, along with upcoming events and anything that can be shared in a memo and not waste staff meeting time (that could be better spent on learning/discussion).

I have since found a few other principal blogs used to share weekly memos with staff that I continue to follow for ideas, so I thought it was only fair that I share what I'm doing here for others.

I immediately began implementing this tool last year as a "Monday Memo" to staff. Whitaker says that this should be given to staff on brightly colored paper in their mailboxes, but I kept mine to email since I am also trying to lead staff using technology. This year I have expanded this practice to include:

*Monday Memo that includes "Great Things I Noticed Last Week," "Upcoming Events," "Nuts & Bolts Notes," and "Tech Tips"

*Friday Focus that shares my professional reflections with staff on something I am reading or learning with staff

*Created a blog that includes these posts, the staff google calendar, occassional staff polls, my shelfari widget (so staff can see what I'm reading), and other resources

Since refining this practice, I have really come to see the benefit of sharing "Great Things I Noticed" because I have observed the same practices be implemented in other classrooms after posting them. Some of the Friday Focus messages I have posted have encouraged discussions that I have overheard in the hallways or had staff mention their reflections to me. Since starting this I have also had a couple of staff ask about how to get started with blogging, how to get started on twitter (since I often share things I learn from people on twitter), and ask to borrow books I've read.

I have previously shared a cross-post of one of my Friday Focus posts HERE.

Here's an example of one of my Monday Memo posts from December:

Great Things I Noticed Last Week:
*While sitting in a 5K mini-lesson on setting a student excitedly said, "I just made a connection to another book we read!"
*In another 5K classroom students were practicing their Jolly Phonics with the SMARTBoard program and were able to read the following words: coast, grain, punch, and chimpanzee using their sounds. I bet the 1st grade teachers love to hear this!
*After 5th grade student presentations, the class was asked to give 3 positive comments and 3 things to improve on. I was amazed to hear the feedback given to students by students and surprised how much Daily 5/Cafe language carried over into the feedback for science presentations.
*5th grade started keeping track of "Writing Non-Negotiables" as writing skills are taught in mini-lessons. You can see the list from one class in the picture on the right. Mrs. B says that this list has really cut down on the time spent conferring with students for writing revising/editing--she does NOT help revise if they have a mistake that is on the non-negotiable list. Wouldn't it be great if we had a list of expectations like this at each grade level?

Events This Week:
*Monday - Mentors meeting at 3:05 in Media Center
*Tuesday - I will be gone all day at the SLATE conference (School Leaders Advancing Technology in Education) in Wisconsin Dells.
*Thursday - No Office Day--I'll be spending my day in 3-5th grade classrooms
K/2/4 Music Concert (including 5th grade band) at 6:30 PM
*Friday - Just a reminder to show your school spirit and wear your school shirt (please help remind your students too)

"Nuts & Bolts" Notes:
*Just a reminder that next week is already mid-quarter (I had to triple check the calendar to be sure!) so make sure you're ready to send home a progress report for each of your students.
* We've added another Tech Tuesday to the calendar for December 20th. I know that's a busy week, but there's quite a few teachers excited about using Pinterest or wanting to learn how before break so Jean and Bethany will be teaching us how that day.

Tech Tip:
*I've seen some great websites being used on the SMARTBoards and in the computer lab that I'm sure students would continue to use at home if they have internet access. You can show them how to access the site from the student resources on the district webpage (if it's there) or include the web address in your newsletter, which can be quite lengthy and difficult to type at times. If you want to learn how to make a shortened web address to share with students/parents for home and for easy access in the computer lab you just need to go to http://bitly.com and sign up for an account. Here's a screencast I made to show you how to use this tool. Let me know if you need any help getting started on this.

Inattentional Blindness

When it comes to reading I usually choose professional education books over fiction to continue my learning as a principal and instructional leader. I have strayed from ed literature after hearing a podcast with Life Coach, Mel Robbins on the Manic Mommies podcast. Her sense of humor and powerful message led me to order her book Stop Saying You're Fine before I even finished listening to the podcast. Even though her book is not an professional education book, I have been making many connections to my position in education throughout reading it.

The biggest connection I've made to education is while reading her chapter on how admitting what you want focuses your attention. "Inattentional blindness" is a phenomenon that describes how we often miss what is right in front of us unless we are completely focused on it.

Here's the best example to point this out. Just watch this youtube clip for 1 minute to take the awareness test. You need to keep track of how many times the team in white passes the ball.



Did you see it? The only reason I did is because I read about the results of this in Robbins' book. In a study involving a similar clip, 46% of people missed it.

What's the point of this? Robbins states, "you miss an enormous number of opportunities to change your life on a daily basis because you are not focused on what you want. You are focused on your problems and maintaining the illusion that you are fine. Until you face the truth about your life and start focusing on opportunities to take action, you will continue to miss the gorilla moonwalking in the background."

WOW!

So often in education, our discussions can go down the trail of unending outside factors (home life, socio-economic status, the schedule/yearly calendar, previous year's teacher, etc.) When we spend our time listing outside factors affecting a student, we are wasting precious time to look at what we can change to better meet a student's needs. Here are just a few examples.

• The young elementary student that is tardy everyday, because his/her single parent works late the night before and sleeps past the alarm. Keep the child in at recess (not a favorite choice), add an individual incentive for that student if he/she does make it on time, make arrangements to keep the student after school, change the schedule so the student isn't missing the instruction that they need the most (I understand that's difficult to do) or start giving them a wake up call each morning (I've actually done that and after about a week of this, they get really sick of it and start coming on time...or change their number).
• The student that is 2 years below reading level and is already getting a "double-dose" of reading (full 90 minutes of literacy in the classroom and 30 minute reading intervention daily), but you know is never reading at home. Then add a "triple dose" of reading and set the child up with 15 minutes of the day reading to a volunteer. No volunteers? Contact a teacher of an older grade and have a student volunteer come down to listen to the student read. If you are the older grade, then have your student go to a younger grade. Or have your student record themselves reading into the free program audacity on your computer.
• The student that just transferred to your school and you wonder what in the world the previous district had for curriculum, because this child is so far behind, yet came with a glowing report card in their cumulative file. Get started on interventions right away.

I challenge you to think about what opportunities you're missing out on in your classroom/school, because you're focused on the problems or obstacles. What are you not doing, but making excuses for why you're not doing it? What is it that you want for your students? What are you going to do to make it happen?

Photo cc license shared by CrazyFast

Web 2.0 and Higher Level Thinking

Each week I post a "Friday Focus" for staff on my staff memo blog as a way to model professional reflection and hopefully inspire them each week. This week I attempted to summarize what I learned from Scott McLeod at SLATE. This is a cross-post from my staff blog.

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This week I attended the SLATE (School Leaders Advancing Technology in Education) conference where I was put on brain-overload from the many challenging thoughts and great ideas shared to continue advancing integration of technology in education.

I was excited to hear our keynote speaker, Scott Mcleod, because I have followed his blog and twitterfeed for a couple of years now. Scott created the following powerful video clip:



Just as I expected, Scott spent 2 hours sharing far too much information for me to share in this post, but I do want to share the "learning nuggets" that I took home with me:

*Web 2.0 -the internet is no longer just reading information, but interacting with it, connecting with others and easily sharing information (i.e. podcasts, facebook, twitter, blogs, youtube, wikipedia, linkdin, four square, pinterest, webkinz, wordle, the list goes on...)

*Consumers vs. Creators - With all the web 2.0 tools today, we are no longer consumers of the internet, we are creators. One well known example of this is the amount of sales from amazon.com that are attributed to the product reviews that people submit. If you are submitting a review, you are helping to create amazon. He also said that if you are reading reviews, but never leaving a review, then you're a "moocher" and you need to help contribute. (With this thought, I'm making it my personal goal to try to add comments to the blog posts that I read throughout the week)

*With all these web 2.0 tools...
-We all have a voice
-We can easily find each other
-We can easily work together

*We are now preparing our students for jobs that don't currently exist.

*Our students need to be problem-solvers and critical thinkers (not "regurgitators")

*If we are going to prepare our students for the new jobs (that we don't even know about now) that require creative work, then we need to plan learning that is in the top 3 of Bloom's Taxonomy (visual above of this)--Analyzing, Evaluating and Creating.

My reflection prompt for you:
What are you doing in your classroom to encourage critical thinking, problem solving and creating? How much of student time is spent consuming information versus creating it?