Sale! Four-year degrees: 25% off! Get them while they’re hot! Four-year degrees—now available in under three years. Today’s special! Start college as a sophomore! If you walked along the sidewalk that runs in front of Homestead High School, it would not be misleading advertising to see these signs hanging in our windows—or to hear someone […]
Category: School Leadership
Building a Dual-Credit Program: An $8 Million Bargain for Students
Student Professional Learning Day: Future-Ready
As we near the end of the school year, I can honestly say that this has been the most challenging year as an educator. Our school has been in person since August, with additional precautions. Like most other schools, we spent a great deal of last summer preparing and planning for a year that had […]
Finding the ‘Why’ in School Improvement Plans
At some point in the career of every school leader, we reach a point where we feel like we are spinning our wheels, constantly pivoting to adapt to new changes or finding our community beginning to question the needs and effectiveness of existing initiatives and changes. It is inevitable that strong but elastic organizations will […]
Equity in Action: Four Steps for School Leaders
“What would you consider to be the most pressing concerns for leaders in education right now? What are the things that keep you up at night?” These were questions posed by my leadership coach in a recent meeting. Like most leaders, I started to run through all the items on my to-do list and the […]
Leave the Seed, Keep the Flesh: Reflections From Principalship and Motherhood
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few,” says the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. We thought we had it all figured out, like avocado toast. Pre-pandemic, we added pumpkin seeds and feta and Mike’s hot honey and slathered it on Mestemacher rye bread. We made guacamole and avocado […]
Peer Mentoring to Build A Culture of Caring
As school leaders, we often ask ourselves: How can I be sure that I am meeting the needs of every one of my students? How can I ensure no one is forgotten? The kids who are naturally part of a group such as band, sports teams, Student Government Association, or clubs generally have found their […]
What Have We Learned?
We thought spring of 2020 was going to be our return to normalcy. We spent the fall and winter of the 2019–20 school year in complete crisis. Our school was supposed to be moving into a renovated co-located school building in fall of 2019, and when that project went into turmoil, so did our school. We […]
Quarantine Routines: An Educator’s Guide to Surviving a Quarantine
You will have to quarantine. For many educators, these are the words we have lost sleep over, worried about hearing, and struggled to plan for when it does happen. While we are preparing lessons for our students who are at home learning and supporting our colleagues’ classes while they are at home, we are hoping […]
Developing Awareness, Adaptability, and Flexibility as School Leaders
How did you start off this semester? Was it a reset, relaunch, reboot, or redux from the fall? Whatever structures were in place during the first semester as our schools offered in-person learning on campus at reduced capacity, remote or distance learning, or a hybrid of those approaches, we already know more than we did […]
NAESP and NASSP Presidents Talk About Diversity
A conversation with Kimbrelle Barbosa Lewis and Robert Motley We recently sat down with two eminent school leaders to discuss the importance of diversity in school leadership. Kimbrelle Barbosa Lewis is the principal of Cordova Elementary in Cordova, TN, as well as the president of the National Association of Elementary Principals (NAESP). Robert Motley is […]