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Systematizing Our Professional Development For The Charter School with Amanda Huza Transformative Principal 320

Social Media: We’re not wasting the time of teachers who have already mastered that aspect of teaching.

Amanda Huza is the principal of Equality charter school.

• Serve about 630 middle and high school students in the bronx.
• Share space with two other partner schools.
• 27 teachers - 50% of them are new or 2 years or less.
• Important to accelerate their growth.
• Want them to feel successful enough to improve student learning.
• Data-based professional development.
• Focus on 10 pieces of Danielson framework.
• Create rich cultures of learning, routines and procedures, logical consequences in the classroom,
• Provide examples and non examples.
• Informal observation on a weekly basis. Teachers know that someone could be in classrooms at any time.
• higher order thinking questions and wait time. Scaffolding questions.
• Focus on specific areas of mastery and track those.
• We’re not wasting the time of teachers who have already mastered that aspect of teaching.
• The list is not concrete, we want to think about the people that we have in front of us.
• Scholar data as well.
• 1–2 day opportunities for teachers to be learners themselves.
• Peer observations.
• coaching role and supervision, then principal position.
• goal is expanding to elementary school.
• Systematizing our professional development for the charter school
• Building up to socratic seminar.
• Get feedback from their peers and from their coaches.
• Large group of kids who need intervention.
• Footage of a demonstration lesson, then feedback from peers.
• Swivl
• Edthena
• Can see videos of exemplars in their school.
• Teachers are on an equal playing field.
• Helps the administrator move away from being a judge.
• To put the pressure on you to remember everything is really unkind to both the administrator and the teacher.
• There’s pretty much always someone coming into the classrooms each day.
• Informal observations happen weekly.
• Weekly coaching meeting.
• Coaching meeting is a debrief of the observation and a review of the data.
• Provided weekly lesson plan feedback.
• Video is 1 time per month at least, sometimes more if they are in higher need.
• Explorations in EdThena.
• Teachers create a professional development support plan.
• Weekly professional development time on Tuesdays.
• Quarterly data meetings.
• How to be a transformative principal? Don’t forget that the work that’s happening is the most important work and the work we used to do, so we need to not be afraid to learn with them.
• Really helps teachers feel supported and valued. amanda.huza@equalitycharter.org

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Kim Marshall is the founder of the Marshall Memo and Jenn David-Lang is the founder of the Main Idea. We talk about their new book, “The Best of the Marshall Memo,”

• As a principal I rarely had time to read in a thoughtful way.
• Why write a book about the Marshall Memo.
• Articles not organized.
• Professional development ideas.
• Educational journals have theme issues.
• How to take the next step from the learning to the doing.
• Practical article about how to have conversations - Don’t email criticism
• Watching a teacher who made a grammatical mistake.
• It’s going to be in the principal’s hands. One strategy, what do you notice?
• Why have a conversation about the grammatical error? Are there reasons why you should talk with this teacher?
• She was miseducating the kids. We couldn’t let that go by.
• Has the leader created a culture of feedback?
• Getting into classrooms enough that you see the bigger picture.
• Teachers need to be appreciated.
• Real time coaching vs after-the-event feedback.
• Routine for principals to take over the class.
• Have a conversation so that the teacher comes to the conclusion on what behavior comes next.
• Sanebox - take control of your email
• How to be a transformative principal? Kim: Have an out of office response on email. Jenn: Ask for feedback.
• If you want to work with Jethro, please get in touch jethrojones.com or schedule a call

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Phil Echols is an Administrator of Professional Learning supporting K-12 needs in the area of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) and coaching in Wake County Public Schools in North Carolina.

• Psychology major and teacher in his home town.

• Counseling

• The power of Twitter.

• People often find a way to monetize things

• Monetization of the network. You can’t monetize the network - via @adamcurry

* #BMETalk - Black male educators
* Black males are like unicorns in so many spaces.
* Every time I meet someone face to face at a conference I create a twitter list with them on it.
* How do you mentor those unicorns?
* 100+ staff members. 1200 students.
* Why do you stay here?
* You could be in a school where there are more minority students. Why do you stay here?
* Good things come from my DNA.
* Patience and reflection comes from my parents.
* Enter spaces with the mindset of who do I need to be in this space?
* How to decide who you need to be in a meeting.
* The relationships of the people at the table require a different approach.
* Paying attention to what people might need.
* Presume positive intent.
* Relationships are foundational.
* Sometimes I can be too heavy on the relationship and we don’t get everything done that we need to!
* Facilitated leadership equilateral relationships, processes, and tasks.
* Leader member exchange theory - focuses on three components: leader follower, and exchanges between those two.
* Leaders often have in groups and out groups.
* Out groups don’t always get everything they need.
* Help people feel like they are in the “in group!“
* How to be a transformative principal? Be more mindful of your individual interactions with all of your staff members.

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Cristina Garza is the director of social impact for the Mission Economic Development Corporation. She curates and leads all STEAM and entrepreneurship initiatives for this EDC, and through this work commits herself improving the financial mobility of area residents, and fostering progressive and equitable economic development practices. Among the programs she founded are Web of Women, an initiative to teach technical skills to women professionals, and Career Readiness and Empowerment of Women (CREW), a multidisciplinary internship that trains young high-school women to serve as leaders in STEM and entrepreneurship. She is  2017 Next City Vanguard and named by CityLab Latino one of the Top 20 Young Civic Leaders of 2017. Before her career in economic development, Cristina worked in several museums in New York City including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rubin of Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and the Brooklyn Museum. 

• What prevents the community relationships from having this kind of impact?
• By the time they leave your school, they are not attractive to industry.
• Don’t want to give tax incentives just to have them import their talent!
• It’s not worth it to train someone who doesn’t have the soft skills.
• There could be better systems where EDC pays for the high schoolers to work somewhere.
• Challenges with push to early-college schools.
• You were ready to get out of your hometown.
• Too scared and insecure to do the real things that I wanted to.
• Seeing myself as being capable of talking about.
• Shy away from educational issues that are hard to measure
• Feeling like we are not good enough.
• Define what is important.
• Everyone is measured by their productivity and we are teaching kids that.
• Reevaluate how much time we are putting in kids’ schedules to think about these issues.
• Have time in kids’ schedules to go to counseling and go to group therapy.
• There are only two things that kids do all day in school: Compete or try to get good grades
• How rare it is for kids to have an opportunity to work on something that is open ended.
• Hard to ideate because they have never been given a prompt and how to deal with it.
• Ideas come from spending time thinking.
• Start the semester with what are the problems you see affecting you and others?
• Giving kids time to find their own story and their own why
• They are experts in their lives.
• Policies should be done in consideration of their voices.
• The level of complexity that youth today are experiencing.
• Understanding their power and owning their truth.
• how to be a transformative principal? Spend at least one hour sending emails to industry leaders asking about how to prepare their kids?

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Cristina Garza is the director of social impact for the Mission Economic Development Corporation. She curates and leads all STEAM and entrepreneurship initiatives for this EDC, and through this work commits herself improving the financial mobility of area residents, and fostering progressive and equitable economic development practices. Among the programs she founded are Web of Women, an initiative to teach technical skills to women professionals, and Career Readiness and Empowerment of Women (CREW), a multidisciplinary internship that trains young high-school women to serve as leaders in STEM and entrepreneurship. She is  2017 Next City Vanguard and named by CityLab Latino one of the Top 20 Young Civic Leaders of 2017. Before her career in economic development, Cristina worked in several museums in New York City including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rubin of Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and the Brooklyn Museum. 

• CREW is a year-long internship and career preparation program for women and non-binary individuals.
• Getting mentored by women in industries that don’t exist in this town.
• I wanted to create a program that I would have benefited from when I was 17
• They are the first in their families to go to college.
• Only Latina in the classroom or the workspace.
• Integration of entrepreneurship and leadership.
• Thinking about the statistics of women in Tech.
• Why are we keeping women of color out of these leadership positions?
• Instead of just putting kids in coding camps, we need to
• Looking at problems that are affecting their communities, then create products or policies that fix that problem.
• Jobs are not just for software engineers.
• Not waiting for someone to tap them on the shoulder and say they are chosen.
• You create change by doing it.
• The coding doesn’t happen until the end of the internship so that they have a purpose for the coding.
• Kids learn way more way faster when they have a problem they are trying to solve.
• We’re not spending enough time simply talking to youth and seeing how they can solve problems in their communities.
• You’ve got to create partnerships with the school and community partners.

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal