Shift to the Future

A recent post, The Secret to Focusing on What Matters by Dan Rockwell talks about choosing One Word to focus your attention.  His statement that “[i]nsignificant leaders focus on trivialities” struck home with me.  I find myself so scattered most of the time trying to take on too much too fast for too many people, often things that really aren’t that important in the big picture.  I know that I need to pick a few priorities and do them well.  In practice that seems to be more ideal than real.  In my work, and I see it for so many of my colleagues and staff, there are simply too many seemingly important things to do.  It is a real challenge to step back and decide what not to do.  So often we, myself included, just work harder and forget to work smarter.  Back to Dan Rockwell’s post… If I were to choose ‘one word’, I think it would be ‘focus’.  I’m not saying I’m willing to commit to this yet (procrastinating), but I’m thinking about it. I...

I had the pleasure of joining about 40 teachers last week for a three day workshop on Creating Effective Groups (Social Theory) led by Barrie Bennett . “The key focus in this session is to shift effective group work beyond the idea of Cooperative Learning.” Although I am not a classroom teacher, I saw tremendous potential in this workshop for learning some new skills in facilitating groups.  There are a lot of parallels between classroom group activities and staff meetings, committee meetings, and other group structures which I am familiar with.  The beauty of this experience though is that I learned an awful lot about good teaching and the challenges teachers experience in their classrooms.  I have gained a whole new appreciation for the complexity of good or great teaching. In this post I’ll highlight a few of the techniques we learned in the workshop.  We learned about how and when to use… Placemat Think-pair-share Graffiti Ranking Ladde...

A colleague of mine, a school principal, recently asked if I could think about how we might better engage people in school staff meetings and District meetings.  In particular we talked about how staff currently use their mobile devices or laptops, either covertly, or overtly but often for purposes unrelated to the meeting.  Believe it or not, meetings still most often are sage on the stage productions where a person broadcasts information to the meeting attendees.  Probably never happens to you, right?!!?  We’re making people suffer and spending a lot of money to run our meetings.  Don’t get me wrong, meetings have a place, people need to be informed and connected, but there must be a better way… Here’s a list of meeting practices that I think should be discontinued… Presentations that consist of slide after slide of bullet points or large blocks of text that a speaker reads Broadcasting information Banning the use of technology Packed agenda...

I was in a lunch & learn session today with the management group in our District.  We were chatting about doing some professional growth planning and I suggested that the group look at the new ways.  Well, after a brief conceptual overview of building a personal / professional learning network (PLN), I got the job of sharing at the next lunch & learn to show how digital tools are used by professionals around the world for that very purpose.  This blog post (and a second one ) materialized for me while running on the treadmill at the gym after work and will serve as the outline and guide for the lunch & learn.  I hope that I write this in such a way that it is useful to teachers, principals, and other professionals wanting to embrace the new ways of building a PLN.  My definition for a PLN is: “a group of people who know stuff that I need to know and who might benefit from knowing stuff that I know” So, essentially a PLN forms through people you fi...