The Top 25 Temptations of Leadership
This is a pretty good list – certainly some important reminders and great things to think about as we all work to be the best leaders we can be this year!
Here are my favorites from the list. What are yours?
· Believing talent, experience, or skills compensate for preparation.
· Overlooking the destructive behaviors of high performers.
· Allowing people to think you agree when you don’t.
5 Tips To Get All Students to Participate
If you had the opportunity to hear Dylan William speak this past August at the ILE Conference, or have watched the most recent webinars centered around feedback using Dylan William’s book Embedded Formative Assessment, I’m sure you’ve walked away with a few strategies to share with your staff. In the article I’ve selected this week, the author, Chris Atkinson, provides us with five tips for increasing student engagement. Additionally, he provides a short video clip of Dylan William sharing his thoughts on the topic.
The Principal as Formative Coach
As we reflect on our practice as administrators, I am reminded of the 7 Characteristics of Highly Effective Leaders. The first few characteristics challenge the principal to lead teacher professional development based on current knowledge of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The intent of The Connected Leader blog is to provide tools that you might use to give instructional leadership.
The article The Principal as Formative Coach reminds us that "Even in those schools fortunate enough to have a curriculum coach, the principal must still set the expectations for student learning. To effectively sustain school improvement, the principal must be the epicenter of school change". The authors use "student work as the foundation for mentoring (teachers) and professional development". A building leader might use the suggestions in this article to strengthen the work in data teams, staff meetings, or the upcoming Late Start.
Starting the Conversation About Grading
The entire November 2011 issue of Educational Leadership is devoted to effective grading practices. This topic will be the focus on the secondary Late Start Day in December and the elementary one in January. The issue of grading gets right to the core of teacher belief systems, and there are strong feelings about adhering to certain practices. "Even though opinions about why grades are important differ, more and more educators are beginning to question traditional grading practices that were developed to sort students into learners and non-learners, not to support learning for all," writes the author of this article. Is your staff questioning traditional grading practices?
Before we explore these ideas during the professional development time slot, this is an excellent time to begin the conversation in your school. The reading will provide ideas to challenge our thinking and lead us to determining what the purpose of grading is.
I am all for standards-based grading. I was fortunate enough to use a standards-based report card in my former district and was part of the steering committee to create a district-wide grading policy which introduces a K-12 Standards-based report card. One of the best quotes from the article is. "grades are not about what students earn; they are about what students learn: That pretty much sums it up!
ReplyDeleteI look forward to futher discussions on this topics.