Chief Equity Advocate

1-minute summary; 6-minute read Core Question:  How do we touch hearts and minds for good? “Everything hangs on one’s thinking …” – Seneca “Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford Core Idea: What we aim at … we eventually achieve.   Words matter. Values matter. Start by defining our north star…

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District Goals – Key to Success

District Goals – Key to Success 4-minute read Four years + four goals = student success. Focused goals, well monitored, improve learning Reeves reports that:  Focus is a prerequisite for school improvement. Focus had the highest relationship with student achievement  Focus, with effective monitoring, and adult efficacy yielded strikingly positive results for all students and…

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Make a Movement. Leave a Legacy

Turn Moments into a Movement 5-minute read Leaving a legacy and leading for the future takes more than keeping the lights on – although there are days when that is a true accomplishment! Here are some thoughts about turning great Moments into Momentum and Movement.   13 Ways – and ONE CAVEAT – to Leave a…

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Growing a Culture of Care

Lessons Learned … Culture of Care. My Window on Education As an active full time coach/consultant I have the privilege of working with:  Three superintendent cohorts representing 50 Superintendents and nearly 200,000 students; two leadership development teams; and a dozen 1:1 coaching relationships.  I see weekly and monthly a broad sweep of educational issues as…

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Creating a Culture of Learning

Creating a Culture of Learning. Two themes. I hear two persistent themes through the pandemic. How do we build a culture of care; just to keep the wheels on and everyone functioning? And … How do we create a culture of learning to improve student learning? Both are needed.  Care and creativity.  Empathy and excellence.…

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Embracing Community Conflict

Addressing Community Conflict … And Living to Tell About It When in doubt, reach out: collaborate. The answer is in the room. Invite the group to help resolve issues of the group. Polarized Schools have become the battleground for polarized views on COVID, race, books, and more. When in conflict, we have only so many…

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Making tough personnel calls

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Principals … Key to Student Learning School improvement rarely (possibly never) happens without great leadership. Principals’ building-wide impact makes them one of the most important forces in student learning. Earlier blogs have highlighted the power of principal pipelines and ongoing capacity development for principals. This blog focuses on discernment: what to do when a principal…

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Value Based Budgeting

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Budget Priorities: What You Value Most Spring brings April showers—and enrollment projections, staffing allocations, and budgeting decisions. Essentially, we are doing three jobs at once: finishing strong, celebrating with grads and retirees, and hiring for the coming year. As one colleague puts it, “God blesses educators with a forgetful memory; otherwise, we would never go…

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Transforming culture in uncertain times

Transformational Leadership When in doubt, reach out! Positional power is dead.  Fear, lack of trust, and chaos call for new leadership: collaborative, adaptive, transformational. Guard, Guide, and Grow Borrowing heavily from Bridges (Transitions), Deal (Corporate Cultures), and Heifetz (Leadership on the Line), three words seem to embody the need for transformative leadership in our times:…

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Learning our way forward

Learning Resilience Together Our superintendent cohort met last week.  Resilience and strategic alignment were our themes:  coping with the present and cautiously moving forward at the speed of trust.  Here (not polished yet) is an emerging toolkit of our collective thinking on resilience.  How we went about it is, in itself, a case study in…

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