It’s a fact—secondary teachers are by nature more individualistic than lower-grade teachers. In most schools, they are singleton teachers who are specialists in their content area. Although this specificity is critical at the secondary level, it can often prevent collaboration and collegiality from becoming part of your school culture. The question for secondary school leaders […]
Category: Collaborative Leadership
From Staff to Team: 5 Practices That Encourage Collaboration to Improve Student Performance
6 Ways Principals Can Empower Student Voice and Choice
Student voice and choice is often talked about in schools but rarely implemented with a consistent focus on empowering students. For this to take place, principals need to intentionally find ways to place student voice and choice at the foundation of their school. My school’s Virtual Tour will focus on strategies to empower student voice […]
Fostering Collective Teacher Efficacy
Change is hard. Organizational change is harder still. How might leaders take action to make engaging with change less difficult? The key may lie in developing efficacy.
Together, We Can: Six Steps to Prepare to Lead This Fall
Brian McCann found guidance for leading during the upcoming school year in, of all places, a young adult novel he picked up in his school library. “It began with this preface that says nothing goes back to exactly how it was—which was what I was trying to do,” McCann, a 2018 Digital Principal of the […]
The Principal’s Secretary: The Roots of Growth for the School and Its Leaders
Seven years ago, I stepped foot into my office as the assistant principal of a middle level school of 800 students. Moving from my third-grade classroom to the main office was a hard transition because, for the previous eight years, I was only responsible for the 20–30 students within my classroom. I went from a […]
Using Google to Promote Teacher Collaboration
While various Google applications such as Google Drive and Google Docs are great tools to use with students, they also can dramatically increase teacher collaboration in schools. Administrators can play an important role in encouraging collaboration by introducing these tools and encouraging their use, as we did at our middle level school.
Flipped Staff Meetings: Great Advice to Give and Follow
Guest post by Paul Hermes “You should try to make your classroom more student-centered and interactive. Don’t talk at your students so much.” “Do you think you could integrate the concepts of the flipped classroom to optimize student learning time?” “How much input do you give your students in choosing what, where, and how they […]
The Poor Man’s Guide to Family Engagement in Our Schools
Guest post by Patrick Arguelles Doing more with less Virtually every school district in the nation is dealing with budget reductions. For most school leaders, there is little unjustified spending to cut, no easy targets, no low-hanging fruit. At the Early College Academy and Career Enrichment Center in Albuquerque, NM, we have examined our vision […]
AVID: A Transformative Pathway for School Improvement
Guest post by Nick Nelson During the 2015–16 school year, The Dalles High School in Oregon was awarded a state grant for AVID training. We didn’t know much about AVID at the time, just that it was a philosophy centered on writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading, and that its goal was to close the […]
National Principals Conference 2018: A Forum for National Problem-Solving
Guest post by Amber Schroering After the recent Parkland shooting in Florida, I found myself sitting in church and couldn’t bring myself to sing. I just stood there, almost feeling numb, wondering how I could make a difference. I began to feel the same feelings creep in as I read and saw the extent to […]