Have a Good Life

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”)

Sponsor: Sanebox

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