LEADING THROUGH LISTENING

This is one of those weeks where there isn't a whole lot grinding my gears... that makes writing a blog every week challenging! With the Halloween holiday upon us, it's hard to believe that we are facing November and the winter athletic season. Last week, our leadership team met to discuss snow watch and the process for canceling/delaying snow due to weather. It's hard to believe that we are already at that point in the year. As the first marking period comes to a close in our schools, please take the time to chat with your student about their year thus far. Ask about what is going well and what their challenges have been. Knowing kids, most children won't want to talk much about it, but we need to keep extending that branch. If not for anything else, it shows that we care. During my visits to our buildings, I have had many opportunities to see our kids engaged in fantastic learning experiences and I have seen our staff members working together to create the best p...

This coming week marks the week where we celebrate and recognize our Board of Education during the statewide Board of Education Recognition Week. Those of us who have committed our careers to education know that being a member of the Board of Education is often times a thankless job. On top of their own busy lives, Board members put in countless hours of meetings, conversations, research, and visits to help ensure that our children are provided with the best resources, facilities, and opportunities possible. The compensation for being a Board member comes in the form of student smiles, "thank you's" from us, and a general pride in working toward a greater cause. With the constant onslaught of State and Federal mandates, the concept of remaining focused on learning and children is becoming increasingly difficult for most Boards. Yet through it all, they find a way to remain focused on improving the opportunities and experiences for our children. So when you see a Board me...

Following the Vietnam War in the 1970's, the Vietnamese government spent millions of dollars trying to solve childhood malnutrition throughout their country. After many failed attempts, 20 years later in the 1990's researchers from the United States determined that poverty was not a cause of malnutrition, however the manner in which families utilized resources was. They approached their research from the standpoint that someone among the Vietnamese people must be flourishing despite challenging living conditions. What they found was simply that families whose children were nourished well were feeding their children on a regular basis and in portions that were suitable for kids, while those who were malnourished were eating on the schedule of an adult and for portions like an adult. The concept of 'Positive Deviance' was born. Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups (the positive deviants), whose un...

Not only one of the classic movies of my generation, Back to the Future can define education in my opinion. If you ever have an opportunity to speak to veteran teachers, you will hear over and over again how educational initiatives are cyclical and that so many of the latest "trends" were concepts used in education back in the 1980's and 1990's. I would argue however that the reason for this feeling is that we all know kids and what kids need, but we keep reinventing the wheel because no one has found the holy grail of education to this point in our history. I had the opportunity to attend a technology summit this week and the key note speaker was amazing. He spent the entire time talking about how we are not utilizing the power of technology and students' own devices to enhance learning. Rather than embracing the opportunities that technology provides us, we tend to look the other way and pretend that it doesn't exist. It's almost that Back to the Futu...

One of the most common phrases that I hear both in education and in society is, "Back when I was a kid..." and then fill in the blank. If everyone seems to think that things were better during a past era and many of us claim to have answers to making things better, why are so many people complaining about the current state of affairs in society? While I can't say I agree that everything was better in an era of the past, I can say that people of older generations and society in general had higher expectations for their children, their community, and the human race in general. In short, our younger generations are getting soft. People seem to want to work less but obtain more. The majority of society is looking for the shortcut. Instead of asking ourselves, "What can I do to make my community/organization better?"; we tend to ask ourselves (and others publicly at times), "What is my organization/community going to do for me?" The concept of 'selfi...