Welcome Back!

A welcoming school campus leads to high levels of engagement and commitment to teaching and learning. This goes beyond customer service. It is about a sense of belonging and ownership.

Take a look around—determine who is being welcomed and primed for a remarkable experience. Involve your staff in brainstorming out-of-the-box ideas for making everyone feel welcomed and valued.

Consider rolling out the red carpet—literally!

Write positive notes home to all students in the first month of school.

Greet everyone with a smile or maybe your signature handshake.

Have your school band perform near the student drop off to greet the students and parents.

As the leader, find out who your new students are this year and challenge yourself to learn their names.

For more information on this topic, check out Douglas Fisher’s book, “How to Create a Culture of Achievement in Your School and Classroom.”

Summer Break: Reset and Find Balance

This is our last Text for Leaders of the school year.  We will resume in July.  Until then, take care of yourselves!

To truly sustain the work of your school you must take care of yourself.  Your students and staff are counting on you.

Check out the Standards for Healthy Leading from the New York Leadership Academy.  What can you do this summer to reset and find balance?

http://apthomas.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/8/8/23889035/standards_for_healthy_leading.pdf

Looking Ahead

Consider some reflective prompts for leaders that may help you frame your leadership goals for next year:

Do the programs and practices in the school actually reflect our school’s stated vision?

How might I better communicate to teachers that their issues or concerns are being heard and addressed?

How might I refocus my attention from managerial tasks in order prioritize classroom observations and teacher evaluations?

When I have evidence that a teacher’s practice is harmful to students, what are my ethical obligations to the teacher and to the students? 

(adapted from Teaching Learning Solutions’ School Leader Coaching Competencies:  A Research Synthesis, 2013)

Teacher Appreciation

It’s Teacher Appreciation week.  May the Fourth be with you.  Do your irreplaceable teachers know you’d storm the galaxy for them?  

As you think of ways to show your appreciation for what teachers do for students and families, consider if you have been using similar retention strategies with your high and low performing teachers.  Use multiple retention strategies with your most effective teachers while encouraging your least effective teachers to leave.  Teachers encouraged to leave are nearly three times as likely to do so and brand-new teachers “will pay off in improved performance about 75% of the time.”  
 

Check out the link for a great one-page, easy-to-implement summary on “5 Ways Principals Can Keep More Irreplaceable Teachers” from The New Teacher Project.  

And don’t forget to encourage your teachers to sign up for MCESA’s Summer Courses 2016!

Steps for Productive Conversations

A school leader’s response to the warning signs he or she observes can ultimately build, or break, the staff culture they envision.

Effective leaders confront warning signs as they come.  Whether from a quick staff survey or by observing staff behavior, once aware there is an issue, taking action is key to ensuring the problem doesn’t spread and weaken your staff culture.  

There are steps you can take to ensure these conversations are productive:

Talk in person. Emails are too easily misread.

Meet in private and with time.  Schedule more time than you think you will need to ensure you have the time and space to have an honest conversation.

Address the issue quickly. It may feel more comfortable to a day or so to prepare what you’ll say, but the quicker the feedback the more likely you’ll be able to address the issue and gain useful feedback in the process.

There is a whole chapter on Staff Culture in the book
Leverage Leadership in which you will find more tips and strategies like these for being intentional as you work to enrich your staff community.

Gathering Staff Input

As the AZMerit testing window comes to a close consider how to end the school year on a positive note by maintaining a strong staff culture.

In the book Leverage Leadership, Brett Peiser writes that, “Great leaders maintain strong staff cultures by remaining continually on the lookout for warning signs.”  He calls this “keeping your ear to the rail” as a way of hearing the train coming before you can see it.  One way to approach this and to demonstrate that you are open to input is through an informal survey.

What’s going well?

What’s one thing that could be going better?

What’s one thing any of the school leaders could do to make your life easier?

Understanding and acting on the warning signs is one way to ensure a strong finish.  How else do you elicit information from your staff that allows you to be proactive in the area of staff culture?

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Behavior-based Interviewing

It’s hiring season! Once you have determined the skills and experiences a new hire would need, consider behavior-based interviewing to support your selection process.

Skip the hypothetical questions. To ascertain a candidate’s skills and experience, behavior-based interview (BBI) questions get at how an applicant has responded to situations or challenges in the past. Depending on the attributes you have identified as priorities, craft your questions in a way that elicits particular skills. For example, “Discuss how you have made content accessible for English learners in your class.” In this way, you and your team can develop a rubric that measures not only the applicant’s experience but their ability to take appropriate action. Read more about BBI and see sample questions here: https://www.naesp.org/resources/2/Principal/2008/J-Fp44.pdf

Building Trust

In Trust Matters Megan Tschannen-Moran writes that trust is the “lubricant” that makes school improvements go smoothly and quickly.  If teachers lack trust in their leaders, they spend energy trying to protect themselves before spending time improving their teaching or school.

In studying trustworthy people, she and her colleagues identified five facets of trust.  We trust when we believe a person is benevolent, honest, open, reliable, and competent.

The table provides the definitions and some specific actions associated with each facet of trust.  Think about how your actions build trust with your staff and students.

Which facet would you like to improve?  What are a few specific actions that you can take this week? 

http://massp.org/downloads_massp/the_main_idea/trust_matters.pdf

Drowning in Data?

Use this tip to take control of your data in planning for next year.

Now is the perfect time to make sure the data you have helps determine root causes that are keeping you from your ultimate goal.   In your upcoming leadership team meetings, ask your team some key questions so you use data efficiently.

What is our ultimate goal next year?

How does our current state differ from our ultimate goal? 

What does our existing data tell us? What existing reports answer our questions?

What does the existing data not tell us?  What questions do we still have?

What data do we still need to collect to answer our questions?

Focus on data that answers your questions.  You may need to collect some additional data, possibly through walk-throughs, focus groups, surveys, or formative assessment and lesson plan analysis in order to show causes or relationships between current practices and outcomes.

Traits of Effective Principals

Already have one foot planted in the next school year?  Bring others along with this tip…

The National Center for Urban School Transformation finds that effective urban principals…

·         Believe

·         Set expectations

·         Identify and minimize barriers to meeting expectations

·         Build the capacity of people to meet expectations

·         Measure and monitor progress toward expectations

·         Acknowledge and celebrate progress toward expectations

·         Persist

Qualities of a Great School Leader

Teachers can’t help but thrive with a motivating, enthusiastic, positive school leader! How would your teachers describe you?

We know that teaching is hard and that great teachers have options.  Many choose where to teach based on the leader.  In her article, “What Makes a Great School Leader?” transformational leadership coach and author Elena Aguliar identifies three qualities that she feels are indicative of a great school leader:

·         Visionary Leadership

·         Community Building

·         Emotional Intelligence

Read more at http://www.edutopia.org/blog/qualities-of-great-school-leader-elena-aguilar

Managing Energy, It's a Renewable Resource

You can manage your time and yet time is a limited resource.  Concentrate this week on managing your energy and the energy on your campus.  Energy is renewable and there are strategies that can increase energy.   Consider debriefing with a colleague during a quick walk around campus or working on a tough task after a positive experience.  How can you structure mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional energy on your campus to maximize the learning and allow students to truly show what they know during testing?  

For more ideas, see https://hbr.org/2007/10/manage-your-energy-not-your-time