He who talks the most learns the most

https://qbnets.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/qip-2015-at-sidney-another-resounding-zzz-success/

If you've ever had to teach a lesson, or do a presentation, the person in that room who learned the most was you. In order to talk about the subject, you needed to research it, understand it, make mistakes with it, and learn from those mistakes.

Our goal for our classroom instruction is 50/50. We need teachers to talk only 50% of the time and students to talk the other 50%. When teachers talk the whole time, students don't learn, they are asked to regurgitate teacher knowledge. Often times the difference between an A student and an F student is the F students can only remember things until Thursday, one day shy of the test.

When students do the talking, wondering, and mistakes, they own the learning. 

What is my biggest concern as a principal?

https://wilsoncountylocalhistorylibrary.wordpress.com/

My biggest concern as a school principal is that I have a large discrepancy in effectiveness among my teachers. By discrepancy I mean a difference in how much of an academic impact one teacher can have on his/her students compared to other teachers in the same grade.

We often hear that people wish they had a choice in schools their children can attend because School A has a better reputation or is known as being a better school. But the research shows that there is only a 30% difference in academic effectiveness, nationwide, among schools. (click here for some research. I'll update it once I hear back from a few people who presented to us last week.)

But there is as high as a 70% difference among teachers in the same building (Dr. Ray Smith, 2015). This means that in some schools, it is an educational lottery. If you are lucky to be with a teacher who is highly effective, your students will show amazing growth. But if you have an unlucky draw, your students might actually leave the school year further behind. That is what keeps me awake at night.

How do we remedy this?

It's really quite simple. We don't have 14 individual kindergarten teachers, 15 individual 1st grade teachers, and 13 individual 2nd grade teachers. We have one TEAM of 14, a team of 15, and a team of 13 who see all the students in their grade as "our" students.

Being a team means they collaborate, agree, disagree, get mad, work through it, and after meeting every Monday morning, during prep and assembly times, they have a plan that includes every students in their grade level. They solicit help from reading and math specialists, they form their own grade-level intervention groups. The tell me they need a day to work together as a team and provide me with the rationale and expected outcomes that make so much sense that I have no choice but to tell them YES. How could I not? By telling them yes, I am helping these teams become stronger, closer, and more interdependent. And who benefits? Kiddos.

Being a team isn't just taking your take turn making copies. Being a team means if one person doesn't pull their weight, the whole team feels it. Being a team doesn't mean everyone is nice and happy and amicable. Being a team means you put aside your personal feelings and don't take it personal when everyone doesn't agree with you. You suck it up, look at the data, and do what's best for the students, not what makes you most comfortable.

I have teams who are exhausted, frustrated, yet excited. You will not find a 70% discrepancy between our highest and lowest performing teachers. Because they are locking elbows and academically moving these mountains of students together.

Remember a previous post about effect size, and how John Hattie identified a .40 as a normal year's growth? Well, Charter schools has an effect size of .20. Class size = .21. Principals/school leaders = .36; school effects = .48. But collective teacher efficacy, a team of teachers working together, believing that all their students can learn, has an effect size of 1.45.

Ah, now I can sleep at night. We've identified a solution and are working to remedy. Sweet dreams.

Reading and facial hair

I actually enjoy not shaving. It saves me time and it's refreshing looking at something different in the mirror from time to time.

But this month my beard has a different purpose: increase reading in our building. Whichever classroom reads the most after-school minutes (this includes reading with parents for our younger kiddos) that class will be able to shave any design/pattern/shape in my beard at the end of the month they want. And I will wear it all day.

Why do you ask? Well, really it's simple

Student-led fundraiser

Hello!

One of our amazing 1st grade Vikings is fundraising to provide 3 Buddy Benches for JCP. Can you help her? Please donate here gofundme.com/z58f23es or spread the word on your social media outlets. 

Students like her are already changing the world! 

What's your Moonshot?

(A repost from last year.)

Take 4 minutes and watch this video...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0uaquGZKx_0

“If we’re afraid to take these great big risks, we stop inspiring people. We stop achieving things. And the biggest nightmare scenario is that we won’t have what it takes to solve the really big challenges.”

How often do we automatically reject an idea or way of thinking because it's so different than what we're use to, what we are currently doing, or the way we've always done things. The problem with what we're used to, what we're currently doing, or the way we've always done things is: we will get the exact results we've always got, maybe slightly better at times. 

The only way we can make a noticeable difference is to do things noticeably different. 

What is your moonshot?

What are you excellent at?

I throw a great knuckle ball. I will even go as far as saying I'm excellent at it, especially with a softball. But saying that I'm excellent means I'm confident that I can show you, on command, consistently. It sounds a little arrogant. But it feels oh so good. :)

Admitting you're excellent at something means you'd better be darn good.Being excellent requires knowing what excellent looks like, how to get there, followed up with relentless, unwavering, exhaustive work.

Our goal at John Campbell Primary is to be striving, everyday, towards excellence. We can be excellent at being fun and we can be excellent at celebrating students. But until we are excellent at helping students make academic growth, we are not excellent.

Our teaching staff has created a Compact of Excellence. This compact includes two components that focus on our Best Self, and our Best Work. Teachers identified two key statements that if we hold ourselves and each other accountable, our students will achieve excellence in their academic growth. One statement focuses on what we can do as a individual, the other focuses on the work our teams are doing. And interestingly enough, both statements are very similar.

Best Self: I will frequently evaluate my impact, that I can change my instruction so ALL students can learn to their full potential. When I need help I will ask for help.

Best Work: We will reflect on, share, evaluate, and change to improve our instruction in order to increase our impact so ALL students can learn and grow.

Grammatically, they're not pretty. They don't provide a lot of details of how, which was not a requirement. But I think the teachers are on the right path. These statements signify their willingness to look at data and be transparent if they did well or need to do better. As teams, they'll identify how to support the students of teachers whose scores were not the best, at the same time helping that teacher learn and improve.

This requires a great deal of trust. This requires interdependently and teams of 13, 14, and 15 teachers working as one.

There is a poster in our staff lounge that reads:

You are not a TEAM

unless you have goals that

require you to work together,

collectively and interdependently

to achieve them. 

You MUST NEED EACH OTHER

to be a team. 

This is our definition of excellence.

School and Love, part II