Talk about Change

January usually finds people talking about resolutions for the year that is about to begin but it has me thinking about the year that is nearly half over.  With this in mind, pulled out my annual leadership goals to see how on track I have been- write theories of action, reach out to students, parents and teachers for feedback, and communicate the reasoning behind key decisions being made at my school.  Let me translate those goals – communicate, communicate and communicate.  It sounds so simple, but it is so important and sometimes hard to do.  Like my recent mistake to write about a change in our school bus drop off location in our school newsletter and forget to directly communicate the change to teachers.  Our school had talked about making this change for over a year and I assumed that it was a simple matter of having the children walk further down a sidewalk.  I have since noticed and been told about all of the glitches this switch caused.

Communication is important and change is hard.  And sometimes a lot more communication is needed about a change that you didn’t think was very hard in the first place.  So here is another “simple” (read that as hard) change that I am implementing at my school – moving from Microsoft Office to Google Docs for my middle school students.  What can be hard about Google Docs?  I am using Google Docs to write this blog post right now.  My high school aged daughter uses Google Docs to do her homework and share it with me when an English paper needs proofreading.  I use Google Docs all the time, what could possibly be hard about Google Docs?  Well, a lot can be hard about a tool that many of my teachers and students might be unfamiliar with (like that new bus drop off!).  It all comes down to communicating about the change.  Here are my plans after meeting with my technology committee this morning:  write a memo to teachers about the change that includes a link to a Google Doc introduction video, include teachers in planning guidelines for using a new cloud based tool, organize some professional development to help teachers learn about this new tool.  Have I forgotten anything?  I know, I can ask my teachers if I have forgotten anything since they are the same people who will be affected by what forget!

What is your Twitter account saying about you?

I’ve begun to dabble some more with social media at my school.  I wrote a few weeks ago about how brave I felt in starting a principal’s blog where community members could comment on my musings about school events.  I’ve branched out a bit more by creating a Twitter profile for my school.  I’ve even created a FaceBook page for my school but I am waiting for the system administrators to find a way to open up that forbidden site so I can post updates while at school.  With the table set, I have been waiting for my digital guests to arrive.  And just as I feared that my digital meal would go cold, I had two guests show up in the form of a comment on my blog and a follower on my school’s Twitter account!

I am certain that expanding my school’s digital footprint is the right thing to do.  But a social media fact of life just dawned on me.  I am so used to posting information in school newsletters and on our web page that I forgot the two-way, nature of social media.  When I checked my first Twitter follower I automatically looked at their digital footprint – seeing who they were following and who was following them.  I do this all the time with the folks who make up my personal learning network on Twitter.  If some principal from the Midwest starts to follow me I check out his or her followers to see if there is anyone I would like to follow too.  It just makes sense to me.  But it somehow felt voyeuristic to be looking at the digital footprint of one of my school families.  I really don’t “know” that principal from Illinois, but I do know that parent who lives down the road from the school.  Does this make my looking at their footprint any different?

One thing I know for sure, your digital footprint says a lot about you.  If you looked at my @principalwells account you would see the many professional connections I have made over time both by looking at who I follow and who follows me.  These connections are important enough to me that I routinely review my followers and delete any spam followers who have found my account.  I also think twice about who I follow with my professional account.  What would it say if you saw that I followed Lady Gaga?  (No offence to the singer, I wouldn’t want to follow her!)  I realize the really cool thing about this is that my Twitter account can say two things about me or my school.  First, it can announce a concert or share a photo of kids learning science and second, it can show my school’s own digital footprint.  If families who follow me do as I do when following a new person on Twitter, I can subtly communicate to them about who and what my school feels is important.

It’s Not You, It’s Me

I wrote last week about how I surprisingly found myself liking the standardized science test that my state requires me to give students each year.  I liked the test because of the critical thinking skills it promotes.  I still like that test, but I received another reminder of what I hate about testing in a message from my state’s department of education today.  The woman who had been coordinating Social Studies instruction across the state announced that her position had been eliminated.  The department of education eliminated any content area support positions for disciplines that are not measured by mandatory annual assessments.  I really hate that.  I was a History major myself and went into the field of education to make Social Studies interesting for students. Social Studies so often seems to be the discipline that receives the least attention at either the local, state, or national level.

Am I angry with my department of education?  No, not really.  Like our local schools, the DOE is dealing with huge budget cuts to a department that was already pretty lean.  I am upset with how our national focus on assessment results has lead us to eliminate support for disciplines that do not directly produce measurable results.  Although one could clearly argue that learning to critically analyse historical facts leads to critical thinking skills that span across other disciplines.  I felt even more upset this past summer when a highly regarded principal in Burlington, Vermont was removed from her position in order to make the district eligible for federal stimulus money.   The principal had done an exceptional job in her school but the federal grant required drastic action to be taken in the city’s lowest performing school.  What has our desire for high test scores and needed grant funding caused us, as educators, to become?

I still stand by my last post, that there are some good assessments out there.  We can do an excellent job of educating our students and this can lead to higher achievement scores that we can be proud of.  But when I think of the unacceptable compromises that education has made in the face of high stakes testing, I don’t like who we have become.  It’s not the test’s fault, it’s ours.

Perhaps Tests Aren’t So Bad

I was working with my staff on science assessments this week.  We were very lucky to have a local professional developer, Karen Reinhardt, work with our teachers.  So why were we working on science assessments?  In truth, it was because our annual science assessment scores were only average and certainly not as good as our math and writing scores.  I must admit that this makes our school sound like so many others that go off chasing higher test scores.  I have met teachers from around the country who work in schools that have “thrown the baby out with the bath water” in order to meet NCLB targets.  But I was enjoying our work on science assessments and I’ll tell you why.

We were working on scientific inquiry tasks from Vermont’s annual science tests (see release tasks ).  Karen lead us through an authentic inquiry exercise – taking the 4th grade released task as students would.  As we took out our answer books and played with weights and sleds, a light bulb went off in my head.  I had thought tests like this one assessed a student’s knowledge of physics and I think a lot of teachers thought this too.  So what happens when students do not possess a deep knowledge of physics?  What if the test takes place before a unit on physics is taught?  Is the student doomed to fail?  They only fail if the test is assessing physics alone, and that is not what this test was doing.  This particular test was assessing a student’s ability to perform an experiment, record and interpret data, and employ critical thinking.  This is something I can totally get behind.  I was actually liking this annual science assessment.

So not all tests are bad.  If the way to achieve high scores on this test is to teach students to be critical thinkers, I’m all behind it.  I support my teacher’s work on developing authentic inquiry tasks because it is good teaching that leads to important learning.  Even if there was no annual, government required, science test, I would want my teachers to do this work.

Is this Brave?

I was writing my annual professional goals with the performance task “Regularly reach out to staff, students, parents, and external partners for feedback and help” in mind.  It feels funny to write this language into my goals because I talk to students, parents, and teachers every day and feel like I get lots of feedback.  Still, I know that receiving feedback is a essential part of my job and that more is better.  I also know that receiving feedback is not always easy.  Asking for feedback means making yourself open and I have seen the potential damage that open feedback has caused in my community through an online public forum.  Our last budget season was tough and resulted in 4 votes on the school budget when it usually passes in one vote.  These two quotes summarize the back and forth that occurred:

One citizen writes – Last night I read the (town) Newsletter for March 2010. In it was a one page article called “School Board Notes” that was essentially a long advertisement to vote yes for the proposed school budget. There are better reasons to vote against the budget than for it.

Another citizen writes – Your criticism of the school board and the budget(s) they’ve presented over the past few years has been constant and unrelenting, yet year after year, your name has failed to appear on the ballot for a position on the school board (or for state representative for that matter).  Don’t you feel you could have more control over what the final budget looks like if you were actually involved in preparing that budget?
I guess the phrase that best applies is: “Put your money where your mouth is”.

Now I have heard of many principals creating their own school blogs where the school community can comment what their principal has said.  So, despite the recent “flavor” of discussion that has existed my town, I am taking a small leap and have created my own school blog. It’s only been up for a week and I have had twenty-seven visits.  No comments yet, darn it.  Is this being brave or is it just being a good principal in the 21st Century?

Entrepreneurial Learning in Schools

A lot of thought has gone into how today’s students are different from the kind of students we were “back in the day.”  Marc Prensky calls them “Digital Natives” and describes how today’s students think and process differently.  Other’s use the less than complimentary name “Screenagers” to describe today’s students.  Unless one explores deeply, the name screenager seems to imply that adolescents spend too much time glued to the screens of their computers or iPhones and that their time is being wasted.

I would argue that we need to focus more on how the world that we live in has changed and less on how kids today are so different.  We used to live in a world where we had to ask permission to share our ideas and learning with a wider audience.  Sure, students always had the opportunity to join the school paper – but you still needed permission and someone still had to review your work to see if you could share it.  Students have passionate ideas all the time but are often forced to wait until “the future” before they could put their ideas into practice.  Our schools need to change because the world for all of us has changed.  We live in an era that celebrates the entrepreneur.  The economic crisis had forced many  to reinvent themselves.  Career counselors are telling college graduates not to search for a career but to make a career.  Fortunately things are beginning to change for students in our schools.  Today I learned about how the Thompson School District in Loveland, CO created an Innovation Lab where students can follow their passions right now, while they are in high school.  I encourage you to watch their presentation which is part of the free  K12online conference going on right now and is full of great ideas from inspirational students and teachers.

Too Many Dips in the Road?

j-curve by Rasmus Pank Roulund

I’ve been thinking a lot about what proponents of educational change, and I guess that is all of us, call the implementation dip.  Michael Fullan points to the implementation dip as one of the key factors that leaders need to recognize when bringing positive change to their schools.  Simply put, while one might have high hopes for change bringing quick improvement in student learning, things often seem worse after change is introduced.  Change is hard, teachers and principals feel disheartened when the positive effects they had hoped for do not materialize.  Fullan argues that leaders need to roll up their sleeves and help teachers get through the implementation dip.

This makes sense, but how many dips can any group of teachers work through?  I argue that there are multiple yearly implementation dips that come from the many large and small changes that teachers face each year.  Big changes like introducing a new curriculum bring dips for sure.  But it is easy to look past the many small changes that bring dips as well.  Introducing a new e-mail system, changing the size of middle school classes or reducing the staffing in the main office are all examples of smaller changes that can bring implementation dips of their own.  So how many changes are too many?  How long before the “road” becomes too bumpy for all of us to travel on?  School leaders need to be aware that the more dips their teachers experience, the more they must roll up their sleeves and help.

Being on the Other End of the Rubric

I’ve been thinking a lot about a new principal evaluation system that my district has begun using.  It is based on the principal evaluation work of Kim Marshall and consists of a set of rubrics.  It feels strange to be on the other end of the rubric.  I have been using Charlotte Danielson’s work to evaluate teachers for years and have really enjoyed using her rubrics as a basis for my discussions with teachers about their work.  The discussions, from my vantage point, have been rich ones that relate to the complexity of teaching.  So why am I giving Marshall’s rubrics so much thought.  Perhaps it is that the evaluation of principals has caught up with the evaluation of teachers.  Moving from vague to specific.  Perhaps it is the (and this shouldn’t be shocking) revelation that my job is complicated.  What is your rubric?  How do you evaluate your work?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on principal evaluation.

Time to Get Busy

Wow!  Summer is over and school has begun.  I am so glad to see the students and teachers back in the school.  Starting up the school year also helps me jump start my professional thinking.  I am excited this week to learn that I will be part of the k12Online Conference later this fall and will have an article published in Principal magazine this winter.  Now it is time to get busy!

A “Word” about ISTE 2010

Word Cloud of Conference Titles by David Warlick

Leave it to David Warlick to see the big picture, albeit in a small picture.  David posted a photo showing the most frequently mentioned words in all if the conference sessions at the ISTE national conference in Denver which is about to start this weekend.  So what stands out?  As you can see for yourself, learning pops out as the most frequently mentioned word which is great because teachers and students are in the business of learning.  Technology and digital stand out as well which makes sense since the ISTE conference is all about technology in education.  I’m a bit concerned that students and teachers stand out a bit less than technology or classroom though.  Students and teachers should come first because, after all, they are the learners.  And what about classroom standing out as a top phrase in conference sessions?  I have been to many ISTE conferences and I know that there are tons of sessions with titles like “Blogging in the Classroom,” “Digital Cameras in the Classroom,” and “Podcasting in the Classroom.”  These sessions titles say “Look, this technology stuff even works in the classroom.”  I certainly believe that every classroom should have digital age tools, but let’s challenge ourselves to think beyond the classroom.  Let’s use these digital age tools to help our students reach out and connect with a world of learners.  There is one thing that I am really disappointed to see – the word leadership is in the smallest font on David’s word cloud.  Leadership is really, really important.  Do I say that because I am a school principal?  Well… yes.  Do I say that because I am presenting a workshop at ISTE in a few days on 21st Century Leadership.  Definitely, yes.  But I also say that because I truly believe that schools need excellent leaders to help bring them forward.  We all know that a principal or superintendent who is either a top down demigod who leads through fear, or a principal or superintendent who ignores what students or teachers need and leaves learners stranded in the wilderness will never really support increased student learning.  I am still psyched about traveling to Denver in a few days and I know I will meet many inspiring school leaders.  I would like to see leadership take an even more important role in future ISTE conferences.