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.

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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 […]

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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.

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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A Professional Learning Community That Achieves Results

Guest post by Jack Baldermann At Westmont High School (WHS)—a Title 1 school just outside Chicago, IL—our team has sustained tremendous growth and significant gains in student achievement. WHS continues to rank in the top 1 percent in Illinois and in the nation for its graduation rate. Over the past five years, 98.5 percent of […]

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Giving Students a Voice in School Improvement

Guest post by Kasey Teske In secondary schools, the greatest untapped resource is our students. Most of our students care deeply about school and have numerous ideas about how to improve their campus community. But how often do we, as principals, involve students in our school improvement efforts? Do the students in our school even […]

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