This week’s interview is with Tom Whitford, an amazing principal of 3(!) schools in Wisconsin.

  • His mentor that taught him a lot about how to be a leader and how to push yourself and others to be better, book reads, and more.
  • Professional Learning Communities in Tom’s ideal world.
  • PLCs require a whole philosophy change to be effective.
  • How to set the stage to be successful in having discussions with teachers. Power of change comes from stories.
  • Create opportunities for conversation.
  • How can administrators tell stories? Start with true stories. (Don’t make things up.) Provide opportunities for real conversation.
  • What can we do to make this work, and what will prevent us from being successful?
  • It is too easy for things to get said behind closed doors, and we need to address challenges early on, and then address issues as they arise.
  • Focus the conversations on continuous improvement on faculty meeting time.
  • “Jumpstart Fridays” - aides and others work with kids so they can do collaboration times.
  • How Tom gets teachers to feel comfortable sharing their stories with Tom and the other teachers.
  • Speed of Trust” By Stephen M.R. Covey
  • We don’t get better, unless we can talk about the mistakes that we made.
  • How Tom figured out that his faculty did not like his strategy for getting them to have fun with his emails. (Background blog post - “Learning with your mistakes”)

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