Have a Good Life

Whaley School is a separate day school with about 100 students with behavioral needs.

• Some students stay through graduation, but goal is to get them back to a neighborhood school.
• Sister school closed down and opened an elementary wing, so now a k12 school!
• 100% special education population - level 4, level 5 is more like a residential treatment center.
• Tier 3 in MTSS/RTI behavior.
• Students can access neighborhood schools. No after-school activities at Whaley. Sometimes a parent goes with them to activities at other schools.
• Why not inclusion at Whaley school?
• Some of the behavioral needs are so intense that staff members do not have the support to deal with those severe behaviors.
• Our motto is working through the problem.
• Physical aggression they are showing towards others.
• Strategies: Crisis Recovery Hallway - able to talk with intervention coaches to walk them through the conflict cycle, with whomever that may be!
• What are you going to do when you go back?
• Teaching kids to advocate for themselves.
• We really believe in no suspensions
• We give the same curriculum that they get at the other schools,
• All of their communication becomes behavior.
• An intervention coach in each classroom and there in the CR room. Intervention with Strategies and Support
• To prevent recidivism, we need to teach skills to help them.
• CR1 - something blows up and you lose your cool. Quickly getting back to class.
• CR2 - spend a little more time talking about what is going on. Choose: mindfulness, exercise, or work.
• CR3 - stay there the rest of the day.
• How to help the teachers welcome kids back into class.
• Every 5 minutes is a new beginning.
• It’s ok to start fresh at the beginning of the next class.
• Also have a few items that are specifically going to put them in the ISS room, Threatening, posturing, etc.
• Eliminating behaviors
• A lot of times teachers may see reactions, rather than instigating actions.
• Suggestions, be very loud and say, “I don’t like that, don’t do that.“
• Check in and check out.
• 1st period talking about goals that they have.
• When they go to checkout, tell how they did.
• Doing so many checkpoints throughout the day. Behavior data every week.
• Data review meetings can be called at any time to try to get a student back into the regular school.
• Data review with the team, then we call a meeting with neighborhood school. Meet at the neighborhood school.
• Sometimes self-sabotage - Extra help for kids that are getting close to transitioning.
• Make sure kids feel that they have support when they leave.
• Why not do a different curriculum with these students who are very different?
• Students could have access to resource classes in all subject areas.
• How to be a transformative principal?
  Build close relationships with students, be out there and make sure that kids know you think they are important.

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

 

Michelle Snyder@mlsnyder92 Vista Visions academy

• Students have set lab times so they come in for special events.
• Students in a lab with 5 or six students
• Whether or not they are required to do the labs is up for debate, but it is good for kids to have the experience.
• What kinds of students are attracted to your school?
• Their reasons vary, but they each have a very specific reason for coming.
• If they hadn’t found us, they would have gone outside the district to a charter school
• Big picture learning. Upstream collaborative.
• Learning through interests (LTI) student internship program
• Teaching skills for seeking out their own internship.
• Parents often speaking for their kids and how do we help parents.
• Takes a lot for parents to be able to step back when they
• How to build for scale for this program.
• Looking at things from a dollars and cents point of view.
• We’re not the same system as a regular school, so we need to look at what’s actually happening to see what we need to do to help them.
• Every Friday afternoon we have collaboration and PD.
• Individual Student Support Spreadsheet to record notes of students.
• Touchstone - morning meeting with staff to see how everyone is doing.
• Always looking at other options for kids.
• How to be a transformative principal? Ask questions of their staff and listen to their answers.

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

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Download Paperless Principal.  

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New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

 

Joe Erpelding, principal of Design39Campus:

• Promotion Designer class - students are creating promotion experience
• 2 promoting classes in last two years
• the trouble with leadership in traditional models.
• Anyone who is interested in leadership gets to be part of Lead39.
• Students create leadership
• Experienceships energize
• Life-ready
• How do we cram it all in?
• Covering the content vs experiencing the content.
• Enduring Learning through creativity, knowledge, identity.
• Design thinking process is an extension of the scientific method.
• Empathy.
• Was the learning really “felt”?
• What does great teaching look like?
• What does great learning look like?
• MOUs to reshape the strict rules and regulations.
• Extensive Hiring Process: disorienting for anyone coming here.
• 4 step process - 1. e-tell 2. Design challenge with student 3. Typical interview 4. Performance task
• Onboarding process - historical documents of where we hoped to be.
• Balance between quicksand and concrete - how do you balance this?
• Steve Farver: Radical LEAP
• Competency-based learning - TK-8 - what is critical?
• Critical components that need to be covered before kids are ready for the next step.
• 1st graders collaborating
• Sense of self leads you to be able to communicate effectively.
• Learner centered lab school - can’t disconnect parents from the learning community.
• FutureNOW conference - parents are invited to be learners.
• How many tours are we giving to our current parents?
• TK-8 Experience
• Pain points - 100 kids leave
• Problem with us - communication around what a student is learning.
• What are we going to assess?
• Send home a progress report twice yearly.
• altschool learning platform.
• Seesaw
• students can showcase their progress against competencies.
• What’s next instead of I’m done.
• allowing students to have variety in how they communicate what they learn.
• Giving kids access.
• Personal connection to mathematics can take a deep dive into mathematics.
• Daily morning collaboration 7:45-8:45
• Gift that we’ve given is time. We overstructure things.
• Still have the same time as their peers at other schools
• How to be a transformative principal? 10% - what am I willing to stretch myself to do tomorrow? What do I want to see this time next year?

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

 

Scott Ellis is the founder and CEO of Mastery Track, which is a software program to help teachers use mastery-based grading in their schools.

• Applied analytics at Hewlett Packard.
• Teacher mentoring programs.
• Blended and personalized learning for the last 7 or 8 years.
• What contribution could I make?
• Look at scale and what that might look like?
• How to use technology as the core process that everyone can access and use for learning.
• Making lots of progress on certain areas, but still having good access to the data is one area we are still struggling.
• Anything more than individual student data is too much data.
• Data wave is crashing across education.
• We need to be crystal clear about what data we need?
• What does the student know?
• So what might we do next?
• Which ways of learning work best for them?
• Blended learning is combining great teaching with technology.
• There is a new job description for teachers in the 21st Century.
• It used to be that the teacher was the source of information, and now there are lots of ways for students to learn. There are so many more tools in the teacher’s toolkit.
• We all know they know different things and are in different places. It’s extremely difficult to do differentiation in that system.
• Teachers know things that nobody else knows. They know the children in front of them. The role of those teachers is to know how to use the variety of tools at their disposal to help kids learn as much as possible.
• The children are at different places in their learning.
• New tech makes things possible in new ways.
• Station rotation models. Individuals and small groups is where the magic happens.
• Effective educational practices that are happening when the teacher is not imparting instruction.
• Start with a dashboard: Where are they now?
• Second step: What are the next steps?
• Third Step: What is our action plan?
• Run a two-week cycle, where kids are learning certain things.
• How to be a transformative principal? Enable students to move at their own pace: learn about what that means, and genuinely embrace it, or start asking the questions to make that happen.

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

 

Alexis Gonzales-Black is a principal designer at IDEO.

• Holacracy - One kind of self-organization practice. Distribute authority into the hands of those that are doing the work.
• Series of circles that are self-running startups or businesses.
• Put the organization’s purpose above your own ego.
• Shift to Holacracy can be challenging.
• What are the self-advocacy skills that people need to be able to be successful?
• Where do you have influence over these structures?
• Managing ourselves in a really interactive way.
• We build stories around what might happen if we take a step out of our comfort zone.
• The story you tell yourself is so important. Storylines
• We’re never going to get it right!
• We are a flawed species and we need to give people the ability to try new things.
• Allow tension to happen. Tension is inevitable.
• Own your tension and be the one who is responsible for resolving that.
• My job as a self-manager is to deal with that.
• Our job title becomes a uniform we can’t take off, rather than being a value we bring to the school
• What do others expect of me?
• What do others need of me?
• What are some of the roles that I can offload to someone else?
• Role Marketplace - bring your roles to the marketplace and share the load!
• The workforce increasingly wants autonomy, mastery, and purpose
• Flexible approaches to budgeting and staff assignment.
• People points.
• It’s holding us back from experimenting, where we definitely need experimentation.
• How to be a transformative principal? Take one piece of yourself and offer it to someone else.

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

The New School Rules with Anthony Kim Transformative Principal 244

Social Media: We talk about failing forward, but we never set up the conditions for failure.

Anthony Kim is the founder and CEO of Education Elements, a consulting company that helps districts meet the needs of their students. He is also the coauthor of “The New School Rules: 6 Vital Practices for Thriving and Responsive Schools“

• Focusing learning for adults on what your school specifically needs.
• Where the experiments came from.
• We talk about failing forward, but we never set up the conditions for failure.
• From “failing forward” to “safe enough to try”.
• It’s obvious when you see that things didn’t. Doing things how we have been doing them really facilitates
• First milestone - classes in school buildings, then factory model.
• Comparing currency to education.
• Starting private schools
• What you know, what you anticipate.
• If you’re bringing it up
• Meeting Agenda - Could be chaotic.
• Jethro’s Blog Post about WeWork’s ]http://www.jethrojones.com/blog/2018/5/17/an-elementary-school-just-acquired-a-startup
• Articulate what game you’re playing rather than arguing over it.
• People often don’t know how to construct the problem of practice.
• Brainstorming vs. decision making.
• People aren’t trained to work in ambiguous environments.
• leaders live in ambiguity. Teachers live in
• How to be a transformative principal? Internal monthly experiments in our company, nothing to do with our work, but trying to understand people’s habits. Meditation example. Finding something that will get people to take action.

 

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Design39Campus

Brief School Profile:

 At Design39Campus, learning experiences are designed with the individual learner in mind. As a collaborative community, we nurture creative confidence, practice design thinking, learn through inquiry, connect globally, use technology and real world tools, and promote the courage and growth mindset necessary to change the world.

Teachers are called “Learning Experience Designers"

 

Location:

17050 Del Sur Ridge Road

San Diego, CA 92127

(858) 676-6639

 

Why are we visiting this school?

 

Alignment with our vision for K12 Magnet

[x]Competency Based

[x]Blended Learning

[x]Diversity

[x]Public School

 

Resources and Links:

School Blog

School Web Site

 

Contact:

Joe Erpelding

jerpelding@powayusd.com

858-382-4356

 

Notes from Visit:

• Everything speaks titles, furniture, etc.
• Open spaces, very flexible  
• Choices in topic, process, product
• Director of innovation
• Teachers collaborating every single day.
• Team (principal and 5 teachers) working together to design the school for a whole year.
• TK - kindergarten for kids that are 5 before december 1 (½ day)
• MIMS - PE teachers. When and why were they brought in?
• Collaboration
• Everyone is a leader.
• Teachers are out of the room easily.
• No more meetings - facilitated learning opportunities.
• Carts for teachers, instead
• No ownership of rooms. Design the space as needed. Reset the space at the end of each day/week/unit.
• Students didn’t have any physical books, were put in the classroom.
• Working agreements for student behavior not school rules.
• Large classrooms, 60-65 kids, 2 teachers.
• Kids without passes, not asking to use the bathroom.
• Every piece of furniture has dual purposes.
• Name design39 39th school and want kids to wonder first and foremost.
• Design Studio for the adults.
• Learning Experience Designers - We light the way.
• Be cognizant of what works well for kids. Do it.
• Activity for K12 sessions: Define what different things mean.

Questions still to ask:

• Community agreements?
• Video about 1st graders collaborating.
• Clubs or activities
• Philosophy on homework?
• Literacy emphasis?
• Lottery process: 1st draw is to match free and reduced lunch. 2nd draw is to fill Special Education demographics. 3rd draw is for diversity. Fourth draw is to do everything.

New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal