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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An Heart of Gratitude

Would you like to improve the culture in your classroom and your life? Try gratitude. Based on my ten years of teaching experience, this is the most powerful tool that I know.

Gratitude has empowered me to teach more effectively, appreciate my individual students, grow in my profession, and enjoy life. Utilizing gratitude, I am able to model one of the most important lessons in life, having a positive attitude, especially about the aspects of life that challenge me.

Gratitude Journal:

To get started in your classroom with gratitude, I recommend actually writing your own gratitude list for a few weeks and feeling its power. Then you can
share your example and start the activity with your students. You might start your gratitude journal with being thankful for being alive, for having food to eat and clothes to wear. If you can think about something related to teaching that you're grateful for, that's even more powerful.

My students use a composition book and start every day by writing five gratitudes. If you have computers or iPads, you might have the students start a file to save their daily gratitude journal. By the end of the year, we each have almost 1,000 gratitudes.

I show the students an example or let them see this form:

1. Thanks for ___________________________.
2. Thanks for ___________________________.
3. Thanks for ___________________________.

Once a week, we go around the class and share our favorite gratitude. I am always encouraged and pleasantly surprised by what my students share. I get to learn about things going on in their lives that I might not hear about otherwise. This helps build a positive culture in our classroom.

In addition, I suggest that the students should be specific. For example, instead of writing, "Thank you for lunch," I would write, "Thank you for the tomatoes
and lettuce in my salad and for the cool, sweet iced tea with friends," or "Thank you for the nutritious lunch made by loving hands."

Exercising the Muscle

Gratitude seems to work like a muscle, and the physical action of writing a gratitude list helps develop "gratitude muscles." A recent study by Professor Philip Watkins from Eastern Washington
University, published in School Psychology Review , showed that those who are the least grateful seem to gain the most from making this effort .

That is good news to those us who may find it hard to start a gratitude list.
Sometimes I really challenge the students by asking if they can be thankful for homework or chores. This
challenge enables them to see what is good about homework -- that it helps them learn and prepares them for school and life.

In her article "Gratitude Activities for the Classroom," Vicki Zakrzewski of the Greater Good Science Center lists many more gratitude activities to try in your
classroom. This year, a new activity that I started in my classroom is writing down gratitudes on sticky notes and putting them on our classroom door, so that we have a positive reminder every time we enter and leave the room.

Students will even take this idea home and post gratitudes on sticky notes around their homes, reminding them to stay grateful.

Visible Change

Recent research by two leaders in the field of gratitude and education, Dr. Robert Emmons and Dr. Jeffrey Froh, supports the idea that gratitude improves the lives of students and adults. It illustrates how:

Keeping a gratitude journal on a daily basis helps students achieve the following:

1. Higher grades
2. Higher goals
3. More satisfaction with relationships, life, and school
4. Less materialism
5. More willingness to give back.

For adults, keeping a gratitude journal enables people to:

1. Be more optimistic
2. Experience more social satisfaction
3. Exercise more often
4. Have less envy and depression
5. Have fewer physical complaints
6. Sleep better.

I see these positive changes in my students. One of them saved her allowance and bought gratitude journals for her family. Her mom was in nursing
school and very stressed. At the dinner table, they would share their gratitudes for the day and grow as a family.

The mom came to me and thanked me for teaching gratitude to her daughter and helping her family. She said it helped her get through nursing school.

Tapping the Potential:

Dr. Kerry Howells, a leading researcher into gratitude and education, actually trains teachers to utilize gratitude in the classroom.

I challenge you to try it yourself and see how it works. My friends who have written a daily gratitude journal for at least two weeks speak positively of the
experience. Gratitude has transformed many lives.

It is true that our focus can stimulate growth. If I focus on the good and I am grateful, more comes into my life.

Conversely, if I complain and focus on the negative, more of that is drawn into my life. For me, the fruit of the focus on gratitude is happiness.

Finally, check out Gratefulness.org for extra gratitude resources.

Courtesy : http://www.edutopia.org

50% Pass English & Mathematics says NECO

THE National Examinations Council has released the November/December 2014 results with the examination body saying there is remarkable improvement when
compared its previous examinations.

The results show 52.94 per cent credit pass in English Language and 55.37 per cent credit pass in Mathematics.

Registrar and the Chief Executive Officer of NECO, Prof. Promise Nwachukwu Okpala, while announcing the results at the council’s national headquarters in Minna, Niger State, on Wednesday, noted that the results were an improvement on the previous exams conducted between 2011 and 2014.

Okpala said that 63,445 candidates registered for the examinations, out of which 61,386 actually sat for the papers with 30.57 per cent of the candidates recording five credits and above.

An analysis of the other core subjects showed that 53,848 candidates sat for Biology with 26,947 pass credit level, representing 50.04 per cent; Chemistry had 28,250 candidates with 14, 858 pass at credit level, representing 51.62 per cent; 28,222 sat for Physics with 57 pass at credit level, representing 0.20 per cent.

Also, 1,753 candidates sat for Further Mathematics and 395 passed at credit level, representing 22.53 per cent; and Agricultural Science had 41,080 candidates with 12,006 pass at credit level, representing 29.22 per cent.

The registrar said 620 cases of malpractices were recorded. Okpala urged students to shun all forms of examination malpractices, saying the council had consistently made attempts to eradicate examination malpractices.