Have a Good Life

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Sarah Levy and Mark Parmet are the co founders Einstein Academy in Colorado.

• K–5 and building out to 8th grade
• Four components of the school: for kids, family, community, today and the future.
• I got sick of hearing people say, “It’s school, kids shouldn’t have fun.”
• Setting an environment where kids can be the best they can.
• While working on things they’re good at, we can also work on things they struggle with.
• What do you love? What do you enjoy? What gets you excited?
• Until we’re feeling good, we’re not going to push ourselves.
• You gotta get to know your kids and their families!
• Parents have fears also.
• As educators, we’re the deciders.
• We tell kids what is important to learn.
• Teaching students and not teaching curriculum.
• How can we integrate hockey into the curriculum?
• Packaged curriculum.
• We’re really trying to build a program around our students.
• Curriculum adheres to Colorado state standards so it does provide some framework.
• Personalized learning profile.
• Private school instead of charter school.
• Only about 160 students in K–8
• The way we get to the content.
• Can’t lose sight of teachers.
• How do we get the best out of the teachers without overwhelming them?
• Teaching the student means you’re also taking the social emotional growth of the student into consideration.
• Hiring school teachers and not classroom teachers.
• All teachers will have a role and responsibility to the whole school, and not just their classroom.
• Teachers all need something different.
• What teachers want is to feel heard, cared for, and supported.
• Planning every morning to talk with teachers and talking with teachers every day after school.
• I wanted to know that my administrators had open lines of communication.
• Creating a culture where teachers want to collaborate.
• How to be a transformative principal? Sarah: Think about where you can be more clear and transparent in your communication
  Mark: Make a list of things you’ve been afraid to do and just start knocking them off that list.

Today’s Transformative Principal sponsor, John Catt Educational, has been publishing high quality guidebooks, magazines and educator-focused professional development books since 1959. John Catt’s mission is to support high-quality teaching and learning by ensuring every educator has access to professional development materials that are research-based, practical, and focused on the key topics proven essential in today’s and tomorrow’s schools.

John Catt amplifies fresh voices on timeless topics, with a list of authors recognized around the world for their fresh perspectives and proven strategies to drive success in modern schools and classrooms. Learn more about these professional development publications that are easy to implement for your entire faculty, and are both quickly digestible and rigorous, by visiting https://us.johncattbookshop.com/. 

Visit this page to learn more about bulk orders and how to bring John Catt’s research-based materials to your school: https://us.johncattbookshop.com/pages/agents-and-distributors

Learn about some of John Catt Educational’s newest publications:

• What the Academy Taught Us: Improving Schools from the Bottom-Up in a Top-Down Transformation Era by Eric Kalenze
• Be More Toddler: Leadership Lessons From Our Little Learners by Emma Turner
• A Quiet Education: Challenging the Extrovert Ideal in Our Schools by Jamie Thom
• Rosenshine’s Principles in Action by Tom Sherrington
• The Thinking School: Developing a Dynamic Learning Community by Kulvarn Atwal
• The researchED Guide to Explicit and Direct Instruction: An evidence-informed guide for teachers by Various Authors

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Literacy nerds Beth Lawrence and Deena Seifert cofounders of infercabulary.com

• Infercabulary is a web-based k–12 interactive tool for helping kids improve vocabulary and skills.
• speed up learning by making learning vocabulary like
• Avidly reading.
• We tend to make words simpler with oral language than authors when writing.
• SLPs by trade.
• Why should we help kids learn vocabulary?
• TedX talk
• 65% of students aren’t capable of comprehending text on grade level.
• Unless you know 95% of words in a text, it will impact your comprehension.
• A foundational skill that needs to exist is a strong vocabulary.
• Breadth and depth of vocabulary.
• If you only have a surface level understanding of a word, you can’t link it to more
• A child needs 10–12 exposures to a word in a variety of contexts to understand the word.
• Tiered words.
• Tier 1: These are the common, everyday words that most children enter school knowing already. Since we don’t need to teach these, this is a tier without tears!
• Tier 2: This tier consists of words that are used across the content areas and are important for students to know and understand. Included here are process words like analyze and evaluate that students will run into on many standardized tests and that are also used at the university level, in many careers, and in everyday life. We really want to get these words into students’ long-term memory.
• Tier 3: This tier consists of content-specific vocabulary—the words that are often defined in textbooks or glossaries. These words are important for imparting ideas during lessons and helping to build students’ background knowledge.
• Over-generalization and under-generalization
• When the author is kind enough to give you context clues.
• How to help kids who hate learning about reading.
• Semantic reasoning -
• Beta tests showed quickly that assumptions were wrong about their intended target student.
• How to be a transformative principal? Deena: Bringing words to life.
  Beth: Do additional homework to understand importance of vocabulary!

Today’s Transformative Principal sponsor, John Catt Educational, has been publishing high quality guidebooks, magazines and educator-focused professional development books since 1959. John Catt’s mission is to support high-quality teaching and learning by ensuring every educator has access to professional development materials that are research-based, practical, and focused on the key topics proven essential in today’s and tomorrow’s schools.

John Catt amplifies fresh voices on timeless topics, with a list of authors recognized around the world for their fresh perspectives and proven strategies to drive success in modern schools and classrooms. Learn more about these professional development publications that are easy to implement for your entire faculty, and are both quickly digestible and rigorous, by visiting https://us.johncattbookshop.com/. 

Visit this page to learn more about bulk orders and how to bring John Catt’s research-based materials to your school: https://us.johncattbookshop.com/pages/agents-and-distributors

Learn about some of John Catt Educational’s newest publications:

• What the Academy Taught Us: Improving Schools from the Bottom-Up in a Top-Down Transformation Era by Eric Kalenze

• Be More Toddler: Leadership Lessons From Our Little Learners by Emma Turner

• A Quiet Education: Challenging the Extrovert Ideal in Our Schools by Jamie Thom

• Rosenshine’s Principles in Action by Tom Sherrington

• The Thinking School: Developing a Dynamic Learning Community by Kulvarn Atwal

• The researchED Guide to Explicit and Direct Instruction: An evidence-informed guide for teachers by Various Authors

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Evidence-informed for Real Learning with Eric Kalenze Transformative Principal 334

Social Media: Evidence-informed means looking at what has worked.

Eric Kalenze is the author of “What The Academy Taught Us: Improving Schools From The Bottom Up In A Top-Down Transformation Era.”

How to teach practitioners to put this into practice.

• High school teacher, English, coach, journalism.
• Help educators around the country become evidence informed.
• Education is upside down.
• ResearchED
• Evidence-informed - looking at what has worked.
• More fascinated with planning instruction according to the evidence we have based in cognitive or behavioral science.
• “There’s contrary evidence that the reading program didn’t work in another district.”
• This is an evidence-based program, well show me the evidence.
• “What has worked” is an incredibly complex study.
• Humans learn incredibly similarly to others, regardless of our backgrounds.
• Repetition is the mother of all learning.
• Practice can make permanent.
• How do we learn, and how can we integrate those sorts of things into practice.
• How might you retrain people who are already ridiculously busy?
• Redesigning teacher coaching and evaluation process.
• Little systemic ways we can talk about scientific studies.
• In what ways can systems make sure their PD is about evidence-based
• Give us the tools you do have, and how can we apply some principles that inform the little things you do?
• In the control of districts.
• I can’t do certain things because district is moving in this direction.
• “What the Academy Taught Us” - less academic, but still crucial in education.
• Remarkable amount of autonomy.
• I don’t know that enough research has been done on kids post-K–12 experience!
• 10 years out - how do you look back on this experience?
• What happened 5–6 years ago.
• “They jumped the girl in front of me and told their story to me intentionally.”
• Still close to each other even after all this time.
• In Search Of Deeper Learning
• Dr. Bob Perdaems
• How to be a transformative principal? A book - Daniel Willingham - When can you trust the experts?
• If the principals can push back on centrally

Today’s Transformative Principal sponsor, John Catt Educational, has been publishing high quality guidebooks, magazines and educator-focused professional development books since 1959. John Catt’s mission is to support high-quality teaching and learning by ensuring every educator has access to professional development materials that are research-based, practical, and focused on the key topics proven essential in today’s and tomorrow’s schools.

John Catt amplifies fresh voices on timeless topics, with a list of authors recognized around the world for their fresh perspectives and proven strategies to drive success in modern schools and classrooms. Learn more about these professional development publications that are easy to implement for your entire faculty, and are both quickly digestible and rigorous, by visiting https://us.johncattbookshop.com/. 

Visit this page to learn more about bulk orders and how to bring John Catt’s research-based materials to your school: https://us.johncattbookshop.com/pages/agents-and-distributors

Learn about some of John Catt Educational’s newest publications:

• What the Academy Taught Us: Improving Schools from the Bottom-Up in a Top-Down Transformation Era by Eric Kalenze

• Be More Toddler: Leadership Lessons From Our Little Learners by Emma Turner

• A Quiet Education: Challenging the Extrovert Ideal in Our Schools by Jamie Thom

• Rosenshine’s Principles in Action by Tom Sherrington

• The Thinking School: Developing a Dynamic Learning Community by Kulvarn Atwal

• The researchED Guide to Explicit and Direct Instruction: An evidence-informed guide for teachers by Various Authors

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal