One of the signature initiatives that Gregg Wieczorek, NASSP’s Immediate Past President, undertook during his term was to visit schools in all 50 states. He called it “one of the best experiences of my professional career.” Highlights from those visits are now available in a new report titled “Leading Forward: Ideas from the Listening and Learning Tour.”

“I was fortunate to visit schools in every state and to see so many great ideas in person. Many of the innovations I saw don’t cost a lot of money—many are less than $1,000 or even free. It’s more a matter of innovation and commitment to making your school better,” writes Wieczorek, who was the principal of Arrowhead Union High School in Hartland, WI, for more than 29 years and the president of NASSP from 2020 to 2022. “My aim with this report is to show school leaders that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Every school administrator I visited was open to sharing their ideas.”

Because he visited multiple schools in each state, and featured more than one idea from most schools, the report includes more than 150 short summaries of programs and innovations. These summaries are organized into 10 broad categories: advisory time, student recognition, scheduling, connecting with the community, curriculum and instruction (student perspective), curriculum and instruction (teacher perspective), making connections (student perspective), making connections (teacher perspective), social-emotional/mental health, and teacher preparation.

The report includes email addresses for the leaders of every school Wieczorek visited to make it easy to reach out for more information. Read the full report here.

Leading-Forward-Report-v4

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