Transformative Principal

  Rachael and John George Both principals in Oregon share their experiences of turning around schools. PreK involvement Trauma-informed practices Stronger voice for advocacy Building strong relationships. Can’t personalize learning unless you know about the kids! Different levels for leaders learning at their own pace. There needs to be customization because different people need different things. Culturally responsive teaching and Trauma How do people get involved? Contact someone and say you want to be involved. How to be a transformative principal? Get into classrooms and support teachers. Schedule a call with Jethro Are you feeling like you are always behind at school? Do you feel like you need about 2 more hours each day to accomplish everything? Here’s how I help principals work manageable hours: Create your ideal week, so that you can leave work at work and enjoy your life! Please take a moment to rate this podcast in iTunes or on Stitcher.  Please follow me on Twitter: @jethrojones for the host

  Rachael and John George Both principals in Oregon share their experiences of turning around schools. The Three Amigos Sandy Green Elementary School - lowest 10% of the schools. Working with a well-known publisher on reading and writing, and it wasn’t going as well as they thought! Year 1 from 10%ile to 50%ile. Year 4 82%ile. With highest Free and Reduced lunch rate in the district. Honed in on systems and structures Full staff turnover in those four years. 3-4 year plan First thing you need to do is establish relationships. You’ve got to be the examiner of systems and structures. Identify holes in intervention and enrichment. Each building has its own issues. Three changes in the first year: 1. Slow 2. Integrated with content, but lost on the students 3. No engagement Students were passively sitting there, while the teacher was doing all the heavy lifting. Level of community involvement. Need to do different because we are teaching different students. How do we do different different? It’s supposed to

Invitation Only Parent Teacher Conferences with Jay Posick Transformative Principal 254 Social Media: If you’re sitting in your office, trouble is going to come find you so you might as well go find it! Jay Posick is principal of Merton Intermediate school in Merton Wisconsin How our culture came to be here in Merton. Weekly nuts and bolts emails “Good Morning Merton Family“ Take care of kids… Connect with people face to face. There aren’t silver bullets. Get out of your office. If you’re sitting in your office, trouble is going to come find you so you might as well go find it! 3 all-staff meetings each year that I’m in charge of. First agenda item on grade level meetings is kids. There are times as educators where we focus more on the negative than on the positive Recognize kids that are going above and beyond. Be kind, be safe, do your job. Good news call of the day. #mertonproud Finding ways to recognize kids. Find a way for teachers to share more with others. Mark French came up with the idea. Have a pos

Hi, this is jethro, host of transformative principal! You can reach me @jethrojones on twitter or at http://transformativeprincipal.org/ Today is episode 253 and I am so excited about what I am going to share. My school is rocking and rolling in an amazing way! We are positively impacting kids not just academically, but socially, as well. It’s fantastic. In fact, I’m much more proud of our soft skills growth than I am of our academic success, because today, kids can learn anything anywhere! Much of that growth is happening in Synergy, which I will talk about later. But first, everyone is always asking, how do we get our schools to change. You’re listening to this podcast because that is what you want to know! In the fall listener survey there were about 90% of my listeners so far who said they wanted to learn more about the school change process. Well, I’m going to tell you the secret. Ready? Here’s my four-step process guaranteed to bring about school change: Vision Communication Empowerment of faculty, par

Thank so much for taking the survey for listeners. Here is the link.   Be sure to check out Danny Bauer's School Leadership Series. We're so grateful to our sponsor AI Coach by Edthena. AI Coach enables your teachers to go through coaching cycles based on their own needs. The virtual coach guides teachers to reflect on their teaching, set a goal, and create an action plan… all based on gathering classroom evidence. It gives support between PD days  and other coaching cycles.Get a free trial for your teachers here.

  Eric Chagala is the principal of of Vista Innovation & Design Academy Twitter Changing with the same kids same teachers same place. Using the design thinking process to actually get there. There is no difference in design thinking between business and schools. Trying to create and add value for and in the community. Identifying who our users are and what their How do you get deep insights? Steve Jobs idea, they never would have come up with that idea. Listen deeply, and read between the lines of what people are asking for. What is it that they have not imagines. About 1000 educational visitors come through our school each year. Want to do better by and for kids. Looking for exposure. Trying to gain understand about what might exist in different capacities. What they understand from the perspective that they have. Important for the designers to have a really vast set of exposures. It’s not just visiting schools. Stopped reading about education stuff. Starting reading and focusing on things from industry

Whaley School is a separate day school with about 100 students with behavioral needs. Some students stay through graduation, but goal is to get them back to a neighborhood school. Sister school closed down and opened an elementary wing, so now a k12 school! 100% special education population - level 4, level 5 is more like a residential treatment center. Tier 3 in MTSS/RTI behavior. Students can access neighborhood schools. No after-school activities at Whaley. Sometimes a parent goes with them to activities at other schools. Why not inclusion at Whaley school? Some of the behavioral needs are so intense that staff members do not have the support to deal with those severe behaviors. Our motto is working through the problem. Physical aggression they are showing towards others. Strategies: Crisis Recovery Hallway - able to talk with intervention coaches to walk them through the conflict cycle, with whomever that may be! What are you going to do when you go back? Teaching kids to advocate for themselves. We real

  Michelle Snyder@mlsnyder92 Vista Visions academy Students have set lab times so they come in for special events. Students in a lab with 5 or six students Whether or not they are required to do the labs is up for debate, but it is good for kids to have the experience. What kinds of students are attracted to your school? Their reasons vary, but they each have a very specific reason for coming. If they hadn’t found us, they would have gone outside the district to a charter school Big picture learning. Upstream collaborative. Learning through interests (LTI) student internship program Teaching skills for seeking out their own internship. Parents often speaking for their kids and how do we help parents. Takes a lot for parents to be able to step back when they How to build for scale for this program. Looking at things from a dollars and cents point of view. We’re not the same system as a regular school, so we need to look at what’s actually happening to see what we need to do to help them. Every Friday afternoo

  Kelly Tenkely founded Anastasis Academy in 2011. We visited this school in September 2018, and we want to make Anastasis is a kindergarten through 8th grade innovative, non-denominational Christian school located in Centennial Colorado. Our Reggio-Emilia, inquiry-based approach challenges students to gain a deep understanding of concepts and skills. Experiential learning allows our students to explore the world through research and play. Students collaborate in small, mixed age classes with teachers who support learning. It's no wonder that our student love coming to school every day! Metanoia - greek the journey of one’s mind, body and spirit. The way we interact is a journey. Tie the morning time in with what is happening in our inquiry block. Community time. Mile walk together - all students and teachers all together. Disregulated kids get regulated by walking together. 3:10 time: we meet all together in the lobby. Daniel Pink’s book, When. The last thing that happens is the thing that

  Joe Erpelding, principal of Design39Campus: Promotion Designer class - students are creating promotion experience 2 promoting classes in last two years the trouble with leadership in traditional models. Anyone who is interested in leadership gets to be part of Lead39. Students create leadership Experienceships energize Life-ready How do we cram it all in? Covering the content vs experiencing the content. Enduring Learning through creativity, knowledge, identity. Design thinking process is an extension of the scientific method. Empathy. Was the learning really “felt”? What does great teaching look like? What does great learning look like? MOUs to reshape the strict rules and regulations. Extensive Hiring Process: disorienting for anyone coming here. 4 step process - 1. e-tell 2. Design challenge with student 3. Typical interview 4. Performance task Onboarding process - historical documents of where we hoped to be. Balance between quicksand and concrete - how do you balance this? Steve Farver: Radical LEAP C

  Scott Ellis is the founder and CEO of Mastery Track, which is a software program to help teachers use mastery-based grading in their schools. Applied analytics at Hewlett Packard. Teacher mentoring programs. Blended and personalized learning for the last 7 or 8 years. What contribution could I make? Look at scale and what that might look like? How to use technology as the core process that everyone can access and use for learning. Making lots of progress on certain areas, but still having good access to the data is one area we are still struggling. Anything more than individual student data is too much data. Data wave is crashing across education. We need to be crystal clear about what data we need? What does the student know? So what might we do next? Which ways of learning work best for them? Blended learning is combining great teaching with technology. There is a new job description for teachers in the 21st Century. It used to be that the teacher was the source of information, and now there are lots of

  Alexis Gonzales-Black is a principal designer at IDEO. Holacracy - One kind of self-organization practice. Distribute authority into the hands of those that are doing the work. Series of circles that are self-running startups or businesses. Put the organization’s purpose above your own ego. Shift to Holacracy can be challenging. What are the self-advocacy skills that people need to be able to be successful? Where do you have influence over these structures? Managing ourselves in a really interactive way. We build stories around what might happen if we take a step out of our comfort zone. The story you tell yourself is so important. Storylines We’re never going to get it right! We are a flawed species and we need to give people the ability to try new things. Allow tension to happen. Tension is inevitable. Own your tension and be the one who is responsible for resolving that. My job as a self-manager is to deal with that. Our job title becomes a uniform we can’t take off, rather than being a value we bring

The New School Rules with Anthony Kim Transformative Principal 244 Social Media: We talk about failing forward, but we never set up the conditions for failure. Anthony Kim is the founder and CEO of Education Elements, a consulting company that helps districts meet the needs of their students. He is also the coauthor of “The New School Rules: 6 Vital Practices for Thriving and Responsive Schools“ Focusing learning for adults on what your school specifically needs. Where the experiments came from. We talk about failing forward, but we never set up the conditions for failure. From “failing forward” to “safe enough to try”. It’s obvious when you see that things didn’t. Doing things how we have been doing them really facilitates First milestone - classes in school buildings, then factory model. Comparing currency to education. Starting private schools What you know, what you anticipate. If you’re bringing it up Meeting Agenda - Could be chaotic. Jethro’s Blog Post about WeWork’s ]http://www.jethrojones.com/blog/2

Design39Campus Brief School Profile:  At Design39Campus, learning experiences are designed with the individual learner in mind. As a collaborative community, we nurture creative confidence, practice design thinking, learn through inquiry, connect globally, use technology and real world tools, and promote the courage and growth mindset necessary to change the world. Teachers are called “Learning Experience Designers"   Location: 17050 Del Sur Ridge Road San Diego, CA 92127 (858) 676-6639   Why are we visiting this school?   Alignment with our vision for K12 Magnet [x]Competency Based [x]Blended Learning [x]Diversity [x]Public School   Resources and Links: School Blog School Web Site   Contact: Joe Erpelding jerpelding@powayusd.com 858-382-4356   Notes from Visit: Everything speaks titles, furniture, etc. Open spaces, very flexible   Choices in topic, process, product Director of innovation Teachers collaborating every single day. Team (principal and 5 teachers) working together to design the school for a whol

Nancy Conrad is the founder of the Conrad Challenge, a global competition to help kids learn without limitations. How Listeners Can Learn More • Website: www.conradchallenge.org • Twitter: @ConradChallenge • Facebook: facebook.com/ConradChallenge • Youtube Channel (Conrad Spirit of Innovation Challenge) Entry Timeline for 2018-19 Challenge: • Team Registration Open Online: Friday, August 24 • Team Registration Closes Online: Friday, October 19 • Investor Pitch Submission Deadline: Friday, November 2 • Finals: April 24-27, 2019, Kennedy Space Center • We are looking for advisors and student teams to participate in the 6 Challenge Categories: ◦ Special Category: Smoke Free World, sponsored by Foundation for a Smoke Free World ◦ Special Category: Transforming Education Through Technology, sponsored by SMART Technologies ◦ Aerospace & Aviation ◦ Cyber-Technology & Security ◦ Energy & Environment ◦ Health & Nutrition No box thinking. This is social impact meets education meets global impact. Inspi

  Matt Coleman, DEd, has worked at every level of the secondary education system. He has served as educational assistant, middle school teacher, high school teacher, high school assistant principal, middle school principal, high school principal, director of secondary education, and assistant superintendent. In his administrative roles, Matt supported significant change resulting in improved outcomes for all kids—with a positive, differential impact on students who have been historically underserved. Not for profit organization - research and consulting about making school work for all kids. Think about what it means to be successful. All kids are served well. Organizational theory - inflexion framework. School identity should inform Schools don’t have a consensus of outcomes that defines readiness. As Inflexion, we use the Four Keys (Think, Know, Act, and Go) developed by our founder, Dr. David Conley, as a critical driver in our work with schools. This framework represents a holistic vision for schools and

  Dr. Clement served nine years as the superintendent of Flowing Wells School District in Tucson, Arizona. Following his retirement in 2013, Dr. Clement was appointed to the Ernest McFarland Citizen’s Chair in Education by the dean of the College of Education at Northern Arizona University. In this endowed, full-time faculty position, Dr. Clement is responsible for teaching and advocating for education throughout Arizona and the nation. Legendary Teacher Day: Sept 27, 2018 Sign up for this free event to recognize your amazing teachers! 4th Thursday in September - stop and think of that teacher, and contact them if you can! How did I get here? It wasn’t by chance. I got to this position because of a couple of great teachers. They never once verbally encouraged me to go into teaching, but they were modeling my career! What am I going to do now? Elevate the profession with my own resources and skills. Open resources Partnering with businesses is an opportunity to recognize and reward their school. Goal is that

Katie Martin is middle school English teacher at heart and currently works at altschool and the Head of Partnerships.  Where to start as a person. Modeling my own learning journey. You can’t control others. You can create the conditions where people can learn new things. We have to look at the bigger picture. Are we educating for life, or are we educating for school? We need to have conversation about what we want learners to have for the future. What do we actually value? Social Ledia What’s possible with technology Less about what your learning, but rather how you’re using the tools. Technology should be there to super power the connections between the people. Teachers plan engaging experiences. Technology can document and manage that so much more effectively than teachers have been able to alone. Learner Centered Innovation Book - reframing the idea of smart. How to be a transformative principal? Talk to students, teachers and parents, and ask what you can do better. Schedule a call with Jethro Are you

In this episode, I am sharing what we did at my school for the first days of school.     We're so grateful to our sponsor AI Coach by Edthena. AI Coach enables your teachers to go through coaching cycles based on their own needs. The virtual coach guides teachers to reflect on their teaching, set a goal, and create an action plan… all based on gathering classroom evidence. It gives support between PD days  and other coaching cycles.Get a free trial for your teachers here.

This interview on the Transformative Leadership Summit was so good, I had to post it. I hope you enjoy it.  You can still get the All Access Pass here. We're so grateful to our sponsor AI Coach by Edthena. AI Coach enables your teachers to go through coaching cycles based on their own needs. The virtual coach guides teachers to reflect on their teaching, set a goal, and create an action plan… all based on gathering classroom evidence. It gives support between PD days  and other coaching cycles.Get a free trial for your teachers here.