LEADING THROUGH LISTENING

After a week hiatus from blogging to enjoy a school event, I've been challenged to join the growing number of educators out there to blog about the 5 Things We Have To Stop Pretending in education. Thank you to Christina Luce for "nudging" me into the blogging world and for prompting this post. So, without further adieu, here are my top 5 things we need to stop pretending in the world of education: 1. PRETENDING!!! We need to stop pretending period!! 2. FAIR AND EQUAL MEAN THE SAME THING. Over the course of history, we have developed this notion that in order to be fair for everyone, things must be equal. Likewise, being equal means that things are fair. Unfortunately, this is simple not true and WE KNOW IT!! All educators have been through countless professional developments where we have heard this but yet when we return to the recesses of our comfort zones, a large majority of people in schools still practice this archaic philosophy. 3. YOU ONLY GET ONE CHANC...

In today's society of immediacy and electronic devices, the art and power of communication seems to be a disappearing skill. The advent of email and text messaging has quickly made the concept of a phone call almost obsolete. All too often when asking staff members if they've spoken with a parent, they can quickly reply with, "I've sent several emails." While email is great and so is text messaging, there is no substitute for a good old-fashioned phone call. Might they take more time? Yes, most often they do. However, the relationships that can be built through a conversation are much stronger than those built through a letter. There is no substitute for the tone in a person's voice or the sense of urgency that can be displayed. When working with students, it is important for us all to remember the POWER of our communications with them rather than for us to think that we have POWER because we are communicating with them. Unfortunately, adults can have mome...

Have you ever had that experience where you just finished saying something and you immediately wonder, "What did I just say?" Or how about that moment when you're giving an impassioned talk and when you pause for a moment you notice the blank stares on the faces of the people you're talking to and you can hear crickets in the audience. The worst is when we are speaking to students and they completely misinterpret something that we are attempting to communicate to them. We've all been there as leaders, teachers, and speakers. So what do we do about it? Ensuring that our message is communicated correctly is more important than we realize. One of the all-time best courses I have taken in my own education was related to psycho-metrics and how the mind works. What we don't realize is that 85% of what we intend to communicate, get's interpreted differently than we want it to. In our head, we here the beautiful symphonies of Beethoven when we speak. Our liste...