Have a Good Life

 

Christopher is a principal at Whitman Hansen Regional High School.

• Transitioning to a new high school.
• A new position gives you the opportunity to reflect on where you want to go and who you want to go.
• Sharing yourself first.
• I’m not a student-centered principal!
• I’m a staff-centered principal.
• Build staff meetings around getting to know each other.
• Building relationships
• Every day, with some exceptions, I’m in classrooms giving feedback to teachers.
• Out in front playing music with kids.
• Using Voxer to give immediate feedback and face-to-face meetings.
• Three simple questions: What’s working? What do I need to stop doing? What can I do to make your life better or easier?
• Start by supporting, then you engage them, then you empower them.
• A good leader is a servant leader.
• A good leader becomes a better leader by making others more successful.
• Clear the road for others.
• Experience is so important and we have to fail to keep learning.
• We don’t know how good we can be.
• Every student leaving the high school with something in their pocket to prepare them for the next level.
• Key components of S1 to raise failing grade to passing grade.
• Empowering teachers to give kids hope and keep integrity of the grades.
• Teachers choose most important units and then give kids an opportunity to make things happen.
• 92% of the kids who did winter school passed the year-long course.
• Summer Read Smackdown!
• Interdisciplinary days - kids don’t come back to a test on the book.
• How to be a transformative principal? Get into classrooms and give honest feedback to teachers so you can have a conversation with them.

 

Schedule a call with Jethro

Are you feeling like you are always behind at school? Do you feel like you need about 2 more hours each day to accomplish everything? Here’s how I help principals work manageable hours: Create your ideal week, so that you can leave work at work and enjoy your life!

Please take a moment to rate this podcast in iTunes or on Stitcher. 

Please follow me on Twitter: @jethrojones for the host and @TrnFrmPrincipal for the show.

Buy Communication Cards

Show notes on TransformativePrincipal.com

Download Paperless Principal.  

Take Control of your email

Web Site

Transformative Principal on Stitcher

Refer A Principal

Best Tools for Busy Administrators Survey

 

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

 

Mike Fisher author of Hacking Instructional Design. Shoutout to @elizabethfisher

• All this stuff that is eating up teachers’ time to plan.
• Easier to just purchase a program or a plan.
• Shift focus to contemporary instructional design.
• Why is it so hard to move away from
• Decision paralysis. So many decisions to make that we don’t know what to do.
• How well we need to design assessments.
• Standards, resources, external assessments.
• The What - standards
• The How - activities
• The How Well? - assessments.
• Tripticks from AAA
• Trying things out - gives you some freedom.
• Being a lead learner is pushed aside to get things done.
• Right-sizing the work. Allow students to be cocreators in instructional design.
• Breaking the standard into manageable bits for teachers and for students.
• Learning targets “standard statement“ with I can in front of it.
• Help students have high level of mastery.
• Kids do not care about your grades!
• Let them be accountable to each other and accountable to the world.
• How to be a transformative Principal? Invite conversation, collaboration. How do we remain loyal to the learner and learning?

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

This is a keynote that I presented for the Alaska Society for Technology in Education Conference in February. Here is the link to the video of it. 

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

 

Byron Darnall is the principal of Potter Gray Elementary School in Bowling Green Kentucky

• Long term sustainable change is slow.
• How do you improve something that is already successful?
• Examine the student experience.
• Who’s school is it?
• As educators we tend to operate from the center.
• Busyness is the disease of our time.
• How are you? Busy! <-bothersome
• “I would love to, but I’m too busy.“
• Am I too busy to get better?
• How to be less busy?
• Every day shouldn’t lead to absolute exhaustion.
• There is nothing easy about it, but we have to be open to finding someone we trust to give us good feedback about our time management
• Systems thinking - not exposed to it as a teacher or
• Centralize school-wide communication through a blog. If it matters, it is on the blog.
• If it can’t be said in 1-2 sentences, it’s a conversation.
• How to be a transformative principal? Talk to your students and ask them questions.

Schedule a call with Jethro

Are you feeling like you are always behind at school? Do you feel like you need about 2 more hours each day to accomplish everything? Here’s how I help principals work manageable hours: Create your ideal week, so that you can leave work at work and enjoy your life!

Please take a moment to rate this podcast in iTunes or on Stitcher. 

Please follow me on Twitter: @jethrojones for the host and @TrnFrmPrincipal for the show.

Buy Communication Cards

Show notes on TransformativePrincipal.com

Download Paperless Principal.  

Take Control of your email

Web Site

Transformative Principal on Stitcher

Refer A Principal

Best Tools for Busy Administrators Survey

 

 

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal