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.
Category: Result-orientation
Fostering Collective Teacher Efficacy
Orange Barrels and Leadership
This summer, we took a family road trip to Toronto and Niagara Falls. During our 12-hour drive to and through Canada, we got stuck in a traffic jam just outside of Hamilton, Ontario, due to road construction. While we were sitting there, all yearning to be done driving and out of our vehicle, I began […]
Cultivating a Culture of Risk-Takers Among Teachers
The focus of any school must be on the student, but emphasizing teacher success pays dividends throughout a school’s culture. Specifically, by encouraging teachers to take risks, we model this positive behavior for students who will need it throughout their academic careers and beyond. Here are five ways we cultivate this at Bernard Middle School.
A Team Approach to Master Scheduling
Most of us are a couple of months away from the daunting task of master schedule construction. Although this task is highly time-consuming, it can set the following year up for success. With this in mind, there are a few things I have learned over the years to help in schedule construction.
Building Momentum, the Jack Way
With the Lumberjacks as our mascot, the pride of R.A. Long High School dates back to 1927. Ninety-two years later, we have lifted the minds and spirits of our lumber town’s community with a true 97 percent graduation rate, with many students the first high school graduates in their family and the first to go […]
Making SMARTer Professional Development Plans
As building administrators, we observe staff and work with them to define clear goals for professional development, but how much time do we take to complete our own professional development plans? As building leaders, it can be easy to think of professional development plans as just another piece of check-the-box compliance. But I urge you […]
A Roadmap for Implementing Standards-Based Grading
Fair, standards-referenced grading systems that communicate what a student knows and can do are often difficult to design. Developing grading systems that are fair and consistent across an entire school district can seem like an impossible task. However, it is a task that is necessary and worthwhile.
Three Principles for Improving Practice
My school, long rated as top-performing, was this year given a rating of “targeted” for underperformance among student subgroups—including African-American, free and reduced-price lunch, and special education students. Though this is understandably not an ideal rating, I look at it as a blessing in disguise. We now have a very clear mandate to look at […]
Teacher Evaluation to Create a Culture of Learning
The teacher evaluation process has been at the forefront of many policy conversations over the past decade, and the underlying assumption resonates just as much today as it did ten years ago: the quality of the classroom teacher is the most important school-level factor that impacts student achievement. As school leaders, we must bring this […]
10 Strategies to Improve Instructional Leadership
I still vividly remember my early years as an assistant principal and principal. Instructional leadership was a routine part of the job along with the budget, master schedule, curriculum development, meetings, emails, phone calls, and many other duties. With the evolution of social media, yet another responsibility was added to my plate in the form of […]