‘Fixing Schools’ quote

 “Effective schools are not perpetual motion machines. You cannot simply get them set up, put them in motion, and watch them go. They require continual leadership to keep going. You can fix schools all you want. If their districts are dysfunctional, they won’t stay fixed.” 

​Karin Chenoweth in Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, 

Poverty, and Achievement (Harvard Education Press, 2021)

My New Sunday Wellness Routine

Balance. 

I am working to be a more balanced person. I used to be ALL work.  My work was just never done.  But being all work didn't mean it all got done. To be more balanced, I bought a paddleboard and snowshoes, I started new hobbies like hydroponics and brewing kombuca, and I turned a space bedroom into a craft room.  These have been helpful!

Now, this week, I've given myself a new checklist for Sundays to ensure that I take a break, enjoy a slower pace, and that I fill my bucket. 

My Sunday list now includes:

• Read for fun
• Play with pups
• Be outside for part of the day
• Rest and take a nap if I want to
• Go through all my photos from the week and mark favorites, send some to my digital frame and some to my family
• Connect with friends
• Make something (craft, meal, treat)
• Plan week (got a new planner I LOVE).  I now spend at least 30-60 mins looking at the week as a whole and each day to know precisely what's coming and be prepared for it.

What's your strategy for balance and wellness? What fills your bucket, refuels you, and helps you be ready for the week ahead yet gives you time to decompress and be human?

Welcome back!!!

And then there comes a day way more than a decade later when you are having so many EXCURSIONS IN EDUCATION that you have to revive the blog you started forever ago!

WELCOME BACK! 

I can't wait to update where I am at these days, all the journies and connections happening on my excursion right now and to track it all through this blog.  My aim is to blog nearly daily.  To create an archive of everything happening around me and to process it for me and share it with you!  

So where am I... well I am a princpal on sabbatical this year.   During my sabbatical, I am:

• A doctoral candidate at NCU aiming to finish this year!
• Seeking a second masters at UMBC in Public Policy
• A fellow with the Maryland General Assembly supporing the Blueprint for Maryland's Future and its Accountabilty and Implementation Board
• A contractor to MSDE through Insight Education supporting 6 assistant principals in the Maryland's Promising Princpal's Academy.
• A business owner of A to Z Education Consulting, LLC developing a company that networks top notch education thinkers in all areas to provide top-notch programs and services that model the way forward for education reform and propell education refrom to a national topic that shows the promise, mandates progress, celebrates everyone along the way
• An education entreprenuer learning the ins and outs of business
• A tech geek trying to keep up with all the processes, tools, resources and new stuff!
• A course creator, a program created
• An author--- I've drafted my first book!!!!!
• An adjunct professor at McDaniel College and admin intern supervisor
• A member of the Leading Lady Collective with AliceAnne Loftus
• and I'm becoming a much more balanced person--- a good daughter, sister, and aunt; the leader of the pack of 4 lab rescues, an engaged neighbor (go little library!) and someone who prioritizes my health and wellness who has hobbies and is constantly learning new things!
• Kombucha is brewing
• Hydroponic garden is ready to start again
• Paddleboard is waiting for warmer weather and I'm trying to organize a snow tubing trip!
• Tomorrow... we learn to crochet....
• My craft room is soooooo cool!!!! I make shirts, wood burn, vinyl projects and more!

So... just a few things going on.  It's all so very energizing.  This is my space for raw reflection (sorry for the typos!! -- where is that darn spellcheck button on blogger?!). My fingers can't keep up with my brain these days... and there are just so many sticky notes and lists.   

This blog will chronical all of these areas.  It will also serve as a place where I process my education passions and observations and dreams.  

Thought this won't be limited to any content, it will focus mostly on education and also education policy, and some of my main focuses are:

• Mentoring and Coaching school leaders (dissertation topic)Early childhood education
• Innovative instructional transformation
• Education reform
• Teacher wellness, supporting our profession.... saving our profession
• Math instruction 
• Ensuring targeted instructional approaches for each student
• Empowering students to take action, to advocate for themselves and the world around them

It's been a fabulous year.  The spring promises to be a wild and amazing ride!  I hope you'll subsrcibe and engage!  Share the journey with me, send me your ideas, provide your thoughts and counter thoughts, share resources. 

Overcoming boredom in education

Engagement is a hot topic in education these days.  While sometimes hard to quantify and oftentimes lacking consensus in definition, engagement is important to monitor and improve.  Today I started reading The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact by Michael Fullan and right there in the opening chapter he describes how both students and educators are bored in school.  Unfortunately, I agree with him.

The stats he offers are sad, disheartening....

"Two thirds of initially happy kindergartners become alienated from schooling by the time they reach grade 9. (Jenkins, 2013) Teacher satisfaction has declined 24 percent since 2008, when 62 percent reported feeling "very satisfied;" within five years only 38 percent were saying that (Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 2013).  Meanwhile and not unrelated, 75 percent of principals  feel that their job has become too complex, half of all principals feel under great stress "several days a week," and the percentage who say they are satisfied with their work has dropped from 68 to 59 since 2008."

But it makes me wonder.... how do we address these, how do we change the stats for the better?

For today, I'm thinking about our students.  Personally, I've always believed that classrooms need to be active, engaging, fun places where students are anything but passive.  I love hands on projects, making students wonder, hooking them with a challenge or tapping into their interest areas.

Recently some new strategies have been on my mind that help address this too...things like The Maker Movement, Genius Hour, Project Based Learning, and Inquiry Based Learning.

What changes do you see that would help hook out students, engage them and make love coming to school to learn?  

Defeat stops learning

For hours today, I tried.  I really, really tried.  I just don't think my brain works the way my professor wants students in our class to think.  I'm supposed to interpret and apply the organizational theory metaphor of brain to schools.  Apparently I am far too literal to make this work!  I enjoyed the articles I had to read, but I don't really get how they apply to this metaphor.  And worse than that, I've already taken a stab to two similar organizational theory metaphors and tried to apply them to schools...but I didn't do a very good job. 

In a perfect world, I'd be able to look back at the feedback I received on my previous two, similar papers and be able to create a new response that is closer to meeting my professor's expectations.  But this world is far from perfect.  And my frustration with post graduate school continues.  

I'm not sure I've ever felt so defeated in my learning career.  Now I see just how much defeat can interfere with learning.  Maybe it's beyond interfering.  I feel like I've hit a total road block with this class and this paper.  I've found so many other things to do today even though I set the time aside for this paper.  However, every time I try to write... I realize just how unsure I am about the topic, so I type and then delete sentences. 

Beyond my personal frustration, I wonder how many students in K-12 classrooms experience this type of defeat and how they cope with it?  Is this level of frustration a reason why some students detach from the learning experience, stop trying, and simply just don't care? 

Once we recognize the impact of defeat on the learning process I think it's really important to think about how we as educators can ensure that students don't experience this level of defeat and frustration.  My suggestions:

• Teach clearly-- know the points you are making and make them explicit
• Monitor students' understanding through the use of formative assessments, check-ins and tasks that require the student to restate/paraphrase the main ideas so misconceptions can be fixed early in the learning process
• Understand that students learn in different ways and at different rates.  Be prepared to explain the concept in a variety of ways to meet that learner where he/she is.
• Provide helpful, targeted, useful feedback early and consistently
• Encourage!  Find something positive to use to motivate the learner.

I'm sure I'll get through this.  All things said and done, maybe I'll even appreciate this experience in the long run as it is making me be much more reflective about the learning process from the perspective of a learner.  I just wish someone would tell professors in secondary settings some of the lessons I'm learning. 

When being in school sucks the life out of you....

Typically, I love being in school.  I love learning, I love reading and I love thinking about things from a new perspective.  But today I'm not feeling it.  I'm sad to admit that my doctoral program has sucked the life out of me over this winter break.  The shame of it is that I'm not even officially in class yet.  The even bigger shame of it is that these two classes are the reason why I selected this degree and they are very interesting to me.  I should LOVE being in these classes.  My 'spring' classes start on Friday.  But, just to be prepared for our first class we had to:

• Read 3 books as well as (large) parts of other books
• Read lots of articles
• Write three papers (2 have to be precisely 6 pages and written to the exact specifications inside the professors head that aren't clear on paper but she's given us three pages of 'suggestions to 'help' us understand what she wants; and one that is a 5 page summary)
• Watch a 2 hour movie, plus a clip of another movie.

We received all of this information maybe the week before Christmas.  Then we started the mad dash of ordering books and planning how to accomplish all of this while also trying to enjoy the holiday and do other household projects.  Enter the HUGE calendar and an awesome friend to support me through this.  I've been plugging away at it, but I don't feel like I've made a tremendously amount of progress.  The big set back was the revision to the paper description that came AFTER I'd written my first draft of the paper.  :-(    So last night as I was reading and reading and reading, I must admit, I started to get really bitter about all this and found myself feeling like this just isn't worth it.  And then I realized that this is a very sad statement about education.  It's not alright for being in school to suck the life out of any student.

I believe strongly that every student, no matter the age -- prek-doctoral studies-- deserves:

• A relationship with their teacher/professor...at least the person knows their name and shows that they care about your learning
• A reasonable work load
• Meaningful tasks that are engaging, memorable and assist in learning important concepts
• Meaningful feedback to confirm and expand learning

By providing these things, not only are students more excited about learning they actually learn more.  At this point, I'm reading to complete the to-do list, but I don't have the luxury of really thinking about the material. 

I will keep plugging through and I'm sure I'll get it all done by Friday.  I hope that my impression of the professor and the course changes upon officially beginning the class because I really want to learn this content and enjoy it. 

Either way, I think it's important for all teachers to consider these notions on behalf of all students.  Let's resolve to do everything possible to keep learning as a meaningful, enjoyable process!

Reflecting and planning/dreaming

With one day left in 2013, I am finding myself deep in thought both reflecting on the past year and thinking about how to make the new year even better.  I'm not a fan of New Years Resolutions, but I do value reflection, planning and dreaming.

So, 2013 flew by but was amazing.  My school year in numbers:
    4th year as Principal at SSES
    Member of 1 new district level committee (social media)
    4 amazing teachers hired to join our team at school
    Attended 4 professional conferences (responsive classroom, ASCD x 2, NAESP)
    Accumulated over 1400 tweets on school account
    1 school blog started with many entries (SouthShoreAACPS.edublogs.org)
    6 doctoral classes, 18 credits accomplished (1year down!)
    4 entries posted to my personal blog (excursionsineducation.blogger.com)
    Co-launched 1 new twitter chat (#mdeschat, Thursdays at 9pm)
    Read too many professional books to count (a few favorites: The Smartest Kids in the World, Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind, Professional Conversations, David and Goliath- ok, just started but 1/2 way done)
   
I'm sure there's a lot more details and successes from the year to include.... and i will as i continue to reflect on the year, but for now this is a start.

One of the most impactful for me has been starting the doctoral program at with an emphasis on educational leadership and policy.  6 classes and 18 credits later... I'm definitely surviving (I think).  Being a student is making me think about education with a fresh perspective.  It makes me grumpy at times because it reminds me that we are doing education all wrong!  My goal is to channel that grumpiness into positive change as we move into the new year (especially with regard to how we think about assessment, inquiry, student ownership of learning, and mastery).

So, as I think about what I was to accomplish in 2014 professionally, educationally and with regards to school.... Here are my early ideas:

 -Spend as much time as possible with students, get into classrooms and be better connected to learning.
- Continue expanding our embrace of innovation by joining global projects, inspiring kids to dream big by tackling real world problems, and encouraging risk-taking by colleagues
- Challenge status que and 'the way we've always done things in education,' both at my school and at a bigger level.
-Embracing blogging as a professional tool to allow me to think through my ideas a more and to elicit conversation from colleagues near and far. (ie more than 4 posts next year!).

I'd love your advice and input about how to make these things happen consistently in 2014.