Ideas for School Administrators

Here are ten ideas

1) Your School Must Be For All Kids 100 Percent of the Time
If you start making decisions based on avoiding conflict, the students lose. This is what sustained me through one of my most difficult decisions. I asked
the school district to let our school health center offer birth control after four girls became pregnant in one semester. For this group of kids, the health center at
King was their primary health care provider. Although
we offer birth control to our students, we are not the birth control school; we are the school that cares about all of its kids. This decision was the right one, and it cemented for all time the central values of
King.

2) Create a Vision, Write It Down, and Start Implementing It : Don't put your vision in your drawer and hope for the
best. Every decision must be aligned with that vision. The whole organization is watching when you make a decision, so consistency is crucial.

3) It's the People, Stupid : The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate
you away from those who are still undecided. (That's adapted from Casey Stengel.) Hire people who
support your vision, who are bright, and who like kids.

4) Paddles in the Water
In Outward Bound, you learn that when you are navigating dangerous rapids in a raft, the only way to succeed is for everyone in the boat to sit out on the edge and paddle really hard, even though everyone would rather be sitting in the center, where it's safer.

At King, in times of crisis, everyone responds with paddles in the water.

5) Find Time to Think During the Day
They pay me to worry. It's OK to stare at the wall and think about how to manage change. If i have 70 people who work . Even the most centered has three bad days each school year. Multiply that by 70 people and that's 210 bad days, which is more than the 180 school days in a year. So, me, I am never going to have a good day -- just get over it.

6) Take Responsibility for the Good and the Bad
If the problems in your school or organization lie below you and the solutions lie above you, then you have rendered yourself irrelevant. The genius of school lies within the school. The solutions to problems are almost always right in front of you.

7) You Have the Ultimate Responsibility
Have very clear expectations. Make sure people have the knowledge, resources, and time to accomplish what you expect. This shows respect. As much as possible, give people the autonomy to manage their
own work, budget, time, and curriculum. Autonomy is the goal, though you still have to inspect.

8) Have a Bias for Yes
When my son was little, I was going through a lot of turmoil at King, and I did not feel like doing much of
anything when I got home. One day, I just decided that whatever he wanted to do, I would do -- play ball, eat ice cream, and so on. I realized the power of yes. It changed our relationship. The only progress you will ever make involves risk: Ideas that teachers have may seem a little unsafe and crazy. Try to think, "How can I make this request into a yes?"

9) Consensus is Overrated
Twenty percent of people will be against anything. When you realize this, you avoid compromising what really should be done because you stop watering
things down. If you always try to reach consensus, you are being led by the 20 percent.

10) Large Change Needs to be Done Quickly
If you wait too long to make changes to a school culture, you have already sanctioned mediocre behavior because you're allowing it. That's when
change is hard, and you begin making bad deals.

Coutesy: http://www.edutopia.org

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Why teachers can’t deliver real personalized learning

It is heart wrenching to imagine what it must be like for a small child to go through the experience of seeing her mother sent to prison. That tragedy is compounded when the school where that child should be able to find help and support is dismissive of her emotional needs.

But from my experience as a teacher, I can understand why something like that would happen. Unfortunately, the real problem isn’t just that a handful of teachers and school administrators at a particular school were insensitive to a child.

The real issue is that the design
of our traditional education system affords teachers and administrators few good options for handling such challenges without neglecting their primary responsibilities.

In a traditional classroom, students do not learn unless the teacher is in control by managing and guiding the learning experience, giving students directions, and making sure they all stay on task and on pace. Because of this reality, a decision to stop and address the emotional needs of one student inevitably means temporarily neglecting the academic needs of the class.

Sometimes, sending a student to a school counselor or administrator is a way to minimize this tradeoff. But when the student is gone from class, she misses valuable instructional time and falls behind. And in an education system based on whole-group instruction, teachers’ work grows exponentially when they have to catch individual students up.

More generally, when many students are already behind academically and
where such crises in their personal lives are far too common, focusing on social and emotional needs can quickly undermine teachers’ and administrators’ efforts to close achievement gaps and change the ultimate life trajectories of their students.

The reality is that our traditional education system was designed to utilize teachers as lesson planners, graders, and managers of whole-group instruction, but today we also expect them to be counselors, mentors, and individual learning specialists.

It is unreasonable to give teachers these additional roles without changing the
structure of their work. But too often we just stack teachers up with additional responsibilities and then expect them to be able to juggle everything with superhuman deftness.

To solve this problem of human capacity constraints, what we need are new models of schooling that use online learning to both personalize learning to each students’ individual needs and also free up teachers from some aspects of their work so that they can focus more on the academic, social, and emotional needs of their individual students.

Fortunately, we already have some promising models for addressing these challenges. As Rick Ogston, the CEO of
Carpe Diem Learning Systems said in Rick Hess and Bror Saxberg’s book, Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age , “When you’re leveraging technology like we are, people want to look at us in terms of technology.

But the secret sauce is not the technology, it’s the relationships.” Similarly, Diane Tavenner, CEO of the Summit Public Schools, has said in the same book of her school’s blended-learning approach, “Our model has more of the stuff that teachers got into education for.

There’s more meaningful one-on-one work, more opportunities to get to know their kids very well.”

When we talk about personalized learning, we often focus on using technology to tailor instruction to students’ individual learning needs.

Equally important, if not more so, is the way personalized learning can make
education more humane. Personalized education is about not only personalizing the instruction students receive, but also the relationships between teachers and
students.

Courtesy: www.christenseninstitute.org