Closing Thoughts

Greetings to anyone still reading (or at least waiting for new content).

I wanted to share with that, as you read this, today is my last day in my current role as a middle school principal. It’s bittersweet, but I am very excited to have accepted a position with a well-known technology company that is named after a fruit and was started by two guys with the same first names.

This decision was one that was both surprisingly easy and surprisingly difficult. It’s difficult to walk away from something you like doing and that you might be pretty good at. On the other side, working for this company has been a dream of mine for as long as I can recall.

I will continue to be involved in education in my new role, though moving forward it will be as a vendor and not a practitioner. I’m happy to share the details with those interested in knowing more, but for now I’d like to share some reflections on three years as the principal of a fantastic middle school.

A friend and colleague challenged me to identify top 5 characteristics of an effective principal and, while I’m not sure I’m the best qualified to do that, I think it’s a fitting way to close out this chapter of my professional career.

Vision

“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”
— Warren G. Bennis

One of the things I learned pretty early on is that it’s not enough to simply have a vision. You have to do a lot of legwork to communicate and get people on board and engaged with the the vision so that it can become a shared vision.

Without a vision, you’re just a manager keeping the status quo in place. With a vision you have an eye on where you’re headed and a “hook” on which to hang all of your other actions. If it doesn’t align with the vision and move the organization forward, it doesn’t belong.

Make an open call and invite those who are leaders in the organization to the table to talk about the vision. I did my best to engage not just “titled” leaders, but also anyone who had an interest and I was surprised to see some folks who had been marginalized take a chance and come to the table. These people have become some of my very best teacher leaders, titled or not.

Strength

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
— Steve Jobs

Moving forward can be challenging. You will naturally have many folks who are on board with and have invested in the vision; these are the easy ones to lead. The challenge is to have the strength to push forward when you encounter the Nay Sayers and Sabateurs. Sadly, they’re out there and no matter how clearly you paint the picture or tell the story of where the organization is headed, you will never get everyone on board.

I think the “a-ha” for me was when one of my mentors in the District told me, “It’s OK not to have everyone on board. If everyone is on board, you’re probably not pushing hard enough.”

I also remember a college professor sharing a (NSFW) scene from the otherwise B-quality Roadhouse. In the scene, Patrick Swayze is telling the would-be bouncers of the shady bar at the center of the film that, no matter how rude or aggressive a customer becomes, they need to “be nice.” I’m reminded of this when I face a difficult situation with a beligerent parent, and I certainly think about it when confronted with a Sabateur.

Humility

“Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.”
— Saint Augustine

This one speaks for itself. I don’t know much, but I am confident I can surround myself with people who know what they’re doing and trust them to do it well. The gestalt power of the group to move the organization forward far exceeds what the leader alone can offer.

It’s easy to get trapped into thinking you need all the answers, but showing your weakness and your willingness to reach out and ask for help sets an important example. It communicates that it’s not only OK not to know everything, but that it’s expected.

One of the things that I recall early on in my first year was turning to the blogs of folks whom I follow online. In many ways, this was helpful, but it was also incredibly humbling. Their schools always sound so perfect and so forward-thinking you can find yourself in a kind of blog-induced funk thinking you’re a horrible leader and your school is the only one with problems. The thing I realized is that every school has its good and bad qualities and that no school is perfect. It’s just our tendency to blog about all the things going well instead of about the angry parent calls or disgruntled faculty members.

Remember to be humble. You can’t do it alone and you probably wouldn’t want to.

Spirit

“A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.”
— Thomas Jefferson

The biggest compliment I have received over the three years in my current position has come up quite a bit when people visit our campus. Many have said, “There’s just a really great energy about this school.” It’s hard to place exactly what that means, but it always makes me proud.

Educating kids in the current political and economic climate, and with all the concerns fresh in our minds about student safety, is a unique challenge. A core belief of mine that I’ve shared before is, “We take our work very seriously, but never ourselves.”

Have fun. Joke. Laugh a lot, especially at yourself.

Patience

“I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.”
— Lao Tzu

Finally, give yourself a break. There are no quick fixes and no canned solutions that will miraculously “fix” any of the problems we face in our schools. I found it important to try striking a balance between “dragging my feet” and “pushing too hard.” You won’t always get it right, but be willing to reflect frequently and adjust as needed.

Though I will leave this blog online for the foreseeable future, I will not be posting any new content here and, to reduce management overhead, I’ll be turning off comments in the coming weeks.

I will continue to maintain a presence on Twitter, Google+, and App.net1 and I look forward to staying in touch with the friends I have made in these virtual spaces over the last few years.

Thank you to all who have read, contributed, and otherwise been a part of my personal and professional growth on this blog. It’s been a fun ride! Stay hungry, stay foolish.

  1. I love app.net. If you want to give it a go, you need an invite. I might have some. [↩]

Caught in an Ed Reform Whirlwind

My twitter friend Dave Meister wrote this the other day and it has stuck with me:

I’m guessing he was listening to or reading Diane Ravitch at the time, I’m not sure. Either way, this short post really struck a chord.

I haven’t written or shared much about it, but my district is currently a pilot for Colorado’s Senate Bill 191 (aka SB-191) educator effectiveness legislation. My district of 15,000 students was selected for this “opportunity” last January and I’ve watched it emerge over the last year feeling very conflicted about where this is all headed.

In addition to piloting the evaluation system — a 23-page-per-teacher document that comprises 50% of a teacher’s “effectiveness” combined with 50% from (you guessed it!) scores on state tests — we are also what is called an “integration” district. This means that we are also rolling out massive curricular shifts in the form of what are being called the math and literacy design collaboratives. These are huge initiatives that tie classroom instruction and assessment directly back to the Common Core State Standards.

None of these things is inherently “bad,” in fact much of the writing focus of the Literacy Design Collaborative I like quite a bit, but when I look at the intensity and speed with which these changes have shifted the work we do in our district, I’m crossing my fingers that it’s the right work. There is an awful lot of corporate funding behind this from The Gates Foundation and others. Last week, I read that Gates is out-funding the US Department of Education nearly 40-1 (You need to be an ASCD member to read the whole thing).

A friend shared his video with me last week as well.

I teach ethics in leadership every summer at CSU and, watching this video, something doesn’t pass the “stench test” for me. The companies that want to take over evaluation systems, create (and, of course, assess) new standards, and then sell us curriculum to teach to them are now essentially grooming superintendents with an astounding 43% placement rate.

I’m not sure what to make of any of this, but just watching the speed and scope of how this has played out in my own district, I can’t help but wonder whether, in 5 or 10 years, we will all be looking around at a Wal-Martized educational landscape, scratching our heads, and wondering, “How did this happen? Why didn’t we see this coming?”

How to run a smooth iPad deployment, and lessons learned

One of the scariest items we faced in the process of planning our 1:1 iPad implementation was deployment. Or, more simply, how do we get 665 iPads into the hands of our students as quickly and efficiently as possible?

What follows is a summary of what we did in the event that it might be useful to someone else embarking on this journey.

One Night Only
Early on we had to decide if we could distribute more than 600 devices in only one night. The short answer? We could and we did. The line looked long early on, but reports from our parents were that most folks were in and out in 20-30 minutes and no one waited more than 45.

It also helped that we “front-loaded” with as many parents as we could. This included sending out the Responsible Use Policy via email, on our web page, on our Facebook, and any other place we could post it. It also meant encouraging kids and families to sign up for an Apple ID (or bring the password for an existing Apple ID) before they arrived on campus for iPad Night.

Divide and Conquer
We decided that in order to move families through the process as quickly as possible, we needed to really break down the key components into bite-sized chunks that could be divided up among staff members with specific skills. For example, not a lot of technical know-how was required to collect signed use policies or distribute app “redeem” codes. A high-level of iPad proficiency was needed, on the other hand, to troubleshoot iCloud backup and network issues. And a whole other level of skill (or an advanced degree in mechanical engineering) was beneficial to those assisting students in outfitting their iPads with an Otterbox case.

Stations and Rotations
In order to make the deployment run as smoothly as possible, we had families move through seven stations; five stations were required and two were optional. In addition to the station personnel, the most “elite” techies on our staff became rovers. To keep any one station from becoming bogged down with a specific, individual problem, the rovers were available to pull folks aside and troubleshoot with them individually while the line continued to flow.

For Next Time

  • Make sure you let Apple know that you’ll be registering folks for Apple IDs from your site. What happens when you try to sign up hundreds of folks for Apple IDs from one IP? Apple shuts it down.
  • Even if you’ve done the above, make sure Apple has the entire range of public IP addresses used by your district.

I know we didn’t get things exactly right, but it was smoother than I expected. Please hit me up via the Contact page or Twitter if our experience can help you in any way!

Why you should rethink your “open-door” policy

For the better part of my nearly-nine-years as an administrator, I took great pride in the fact that I rarely closed my door. I’m not sure when in my leadership development I came to revere the open-door philosophy as the defining characteristic of great principals, but I’m rethinking this approach. After almost nine years as an administrator, including three as a principal, I’m pretty certain that an open-door policy is not good for anyone.

As teacher evaluations and school improvement plans increase in length and complexity (certainly a topic worthy of its own post, but right now it’s the hand I’ve been dealt if I want to keep my job — which I do!), I have found that the perpetual parade of pop-ins — these two to four minute, standup conversations — means no one is getting what they deserve. The constant shifts in my attention and the resulting on-and-off cognitive focus on a document I’m trying to finish mean that I am constantly working on things at the last minute. A writing task that should take me an hour or two takes me a couple of days.

On the flip side of this equation, consider the staff member who wants to talk about something important to him or her. Is it fair to that person to have the portion of my attention not thinking about the work I just abandoned in order to chat?

I’ve realized that I cannot do my job as effectively as my students and school deserve if I am constantly doing it in two-to-four minute bursts.

In re-considering the open-door norm I’ve established, I am looking at strategies that balance my need to handle the administrivia that comes with the job (always doing it at home at night is unfair to another group of stakeholders: my family), the need and desire of teachers, parents, and students to have my attention, and the need to just “wander around” and visit classrooms.

Some things I’m chewing in now thanks, in part, to an article in last month’s Phi Delta Kappan by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo:

  • It must truly become a norm that is communicated to all stakeholders. It’s not something I can just do without clarifying the purpose behind the shift. However,
  • It’s not necessarily something I’m going to ask “permission” for, either.
  • I evaluate 26 licensed staff members. If I set up short, biweekly meetings with each one, would that help? That way they’d know they have my time in the not-too-distant future and that it’s truly a time that we are “present” and not just shifting from some other task or having a “fly by” conversation.
  • How many non-assertive staff members have I missed talking to because the assertive ones are the ones being heard most?

As I approach the midpoint of year three, I am proud of the shifts we have made in our school. Now it’s time to dial in this open-door thing because right now, no one is benefiting.

Why you should focus on a small number of apps in your 1:1 environment

I am frequently asked what apps schools should initially install before deploying iPads in a 1:1 environment. After seven weeks of observing and learning, I think I can safely say schools should start with a small number if content-agnostic apps and build as the need arises.

Two years ago, we implemented a 2:1 iPad textbook replacement in social studies. We rolled out iPads with more than 50 apps from a digital Constitution to various atlases and content-heavy apps. The vast majority of the apps went unused.

One possibility is that really digging in and learning 50 apps is a full-time job that most teachers didn’t have the time or inclination to undertake. Teachers quickly settled in on a core group of apps like Evernote, Dropbox, and the Google Apps suite for day-to-day classwork.

Based on what we learned in this initial implementation, when we had the opportuny to go 1:1, our Instructional Technologist and I, along with our district curriculum director decided that a narrow but powerful set of apps was the way to go. Others would be added as needed.

Every iPad was delivered to students with:

  • Pages
  • Keynote
  • iMovie
  • Notability

With this suite of apps, in addition to Edmodo, our kids had everything they needed to get started.

By limiting the starter set of apps as we did, we ended up with apps that are content agnostic and can be used in any class. For us, this meant students didn’t have to learn different routines in different classes.

As we continue in year one, we are also able to be strategic about how we spend our limited amount of professional development time. Teachers for whom this is new and scary have four apps on which to focus, each with a very specific purpose.

Finally, using these apps teach students skills that are widely applicable. Writing, presenting, and note-taking are skills they use in all their classes and which they’ll take with them, hopefully, long after they leave our school.

If you are in the planning stages of a 1:1 deployment at your school, the best advice I can give is to begin with a simple set of apps and support your staff and students in learning them well. Then, when it’s time to begin adding content-specific apps, you’ll have a strong foundation of key skills on which to build.

Guilty

We’ve had iPads in every kids’ hands for a total of about 12 days now. We’ve also got a voluminous new state evaluation system we’re piloting, a key component of which is a digital management system for teachers and evaluators to keep track of their goals, observations, and artifacts1. Layered on top of that, we’re using an online tool to schedule parent-teacher conferences for the first time ever.

Needless to say, I have seen that some of my teachers and staff members are on technology overload. The disparity, however, between the newer and more veteran staff has never been wider. I routinely do a “ticket out the door” after structured professional learning opportunities and, while newer (often younger) staff will indicate that they are “excited” about the new tools and how much easier it will make things, some veteran staff are more stressed than ever. How, I wondered, could some people see such possibilities and some see nothing more than one more added stressor?

While I don’t think I’ve got it completely figured out, I had a small cognitive breakthrough while I was on my run last night (the best time to think!).

Those of us who grew up or came of age with technology think less about the tools themselves. I haven’t done any research on this, but I’ll use myself as an example. When I am told that our state evaluations will be collected using an online tool, I launch my browser and type in the address. When someone mentions using a particular app in their class with their students, I have built-in schema that tells me to open my iPad, launch the App Store, and search for the app. I spend little or no time thinking about the tool (the computer or the iPad) and, instead, set about doing the task.

Those who either did not come of age with technology or who have been able to get by with minimal use of technology struggle, first and foremost, with the tool. For these staff members, what I take for granted (e.g. they said it’s a website so I opened my browser) has to be explicitly scaffolded. I think back to the number of times I have led a conversation like this: “So you go to the school website…” only to realize that someone needed me to say, “You go to the Dock. That’s the little bar at the bottom [or side] of your screen with all the little pictures of apps. You click on Chrome [or 'the stamp' or 'the compass'] which is the little circle with the colors around it. No. The other one. Now, when it launches, put your cursor in the address bar and type the school site. No, you don’t need h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash. No. The other slash…”

So my struggle right now, as a leader, is how to run with the front of the pack while still coaching and supporting those for whom even the most basic task is a major hurdle. I worry that I have been complicit for too long in not pushing hard enough or providing enough support and, now that we’re a 1:1 school, even the learning oportunities we’ve already provided hasn’t been enough.

  1. I’ll withhold commentary on said evaluation system for another day [↩]

Flip This

I need to stop myself from engaging in the same conversation over and over.

Take this Tweet from my online colleague, Amber, who is an elementary school assistant principal:


Amber is one of many virtual colleagues with whom I connect frequently and banter about all things related to education, technology, and even family. Her Tweet offers some strong support for the idea of the “flipped classroom”; an idea which has gained a lot of momentum among progressive, well-intentioned educators in the last couple years. It ensures success for ALL students, she states.

I have three main cognitive hurdles that prevent me from fully jumping on board with this idea:

  • First, we lack the common language to meaningfully engage in a dialogue about flipped classrooms. Many times I try to tweet back at someone to probe their thinking further. Unfortunately, no matter how softly I try to couch my questions, they are often met with fierce defense of the Flipped Classroom.
  • Next, amidst much debate about the effectiveness of any kind of homework, proponents of classroom flipping generally frame it as an opportunity for students to view the “lecture” portion of class as homework. The rationale, as I have understood it, it so that there is more class time for “fun stuff” like labs and hands-on activities. Doing so carries a load of assumptions, including (minimally) the fact that students (1) have access, (2) will bother to watch it, and (3) have the skills to process and make meaning of what they’re watching (note-taking, summarizing, and the ability to ask good questions about what they don’t understand for starters). In my experience, these skills often need to be explicitly taught and scaffolded for students.
  • Finally, I have not seen any evidence that suggests that a flipped classroom is better than a traditional classroom with all other things being equal (same content, same instruction, same teacher…). I often read words like “better” and “improved” (again, laden with assumptions about what’s going on in other teachers’ classrooms) without any qualifiers. Better than what? Based on what? Improved compared to what?

Taking a great lecture and “flipping” it removes the interaction and shared experience of being in a classroom or lecture hall with a strong teacher who can read the room — a teacher who knows how to coax the best out of students through purposeful, intentional verbal and non-verbal cues. Flipping a lousy lecture just tortures kids at home instead of in the classroom. There are just too many variables missing from the conversation around flipped classrooms.

If we want to create relevant, problem-based, constructivist learning opportunities for our students, simply rearranging the “old way” of doing things won’t be enough.

iPad 1:1 Models: Personal or Managed?

One of the first decisions we had to make when we decided to embark on our 1:1 iPad project was whether to use what I’ll call the “personal” or “managed” models for iPad distribution. I’ll briefly lay out what I know of each model (keep in mind, I’m a principal not a systems engineer), what we decided, and why.

Managed Model
In this model, the school or district own all the software licenses for apps on the iPads. Neither students nor teachers are able to log in with an Apple ID so they only have access to the apps that are school- or district-provided. Theoretically, a student could connect an iPad to their own computer and do a “restore” in order to set it up as their personal device, but they would then lose all the apps provided by the school.

Personal Model
In this model, certain aspects are managed by the district or school (setting up wifi access, restricting app downloads to those rated for 17 and under, etc.) but every user has his or her own Apple ID. This allows students and teachers to reasonably personalize their devices with their own music and any apps they have already purchased on the same Apple ID. In this model, apps are purchased by the school or district but become student-owned; apps are viewed by the school as consumables that are re-purchased each year. Under the personal model, when a student matriculates out of the school, he or she would return their iPad while retaining access to their all of their apps and anything else backed up in their iCloud.

What we decided
These are, of course, superficial descriptions but they give you a general idea of the two models. There are always plenty of “what ifs” and ways to create models that are a hybrid of these two.

In the end, we chose the personal model for several reasons. First, we wanted students and staff to be able to reasonably personalize their devices with existing purchases. I also felt it would give each user more ownership of their device if they felt they could customize it within reason. We still have several profiles loaded1 that our fabulous IT folks have installed and which help us mass-manage important device settings.

If you choose to adopt this model, it is critical to front-load as much as possible with your students and families so that they have already chosen an Apple ID to use on their device. In some cases, families chose to use an existing Apple ID and in some they chose to create a new one for their student. If it were my student, I would make sure that he or she had a unique Apple ID. In my opinion, by middle school kids will want to purchase their own music and apps and I don’t want my iTunes cluttered with “One Direction” singles.

The decision of whether to go personal or managed is a critical one to your deployment and I have provided the briefest of summaries here. You will want to ensure that all parties who have a stake in the management process are involved in the decision.

  1. For my non-IT purposes, I understand that a “Profile” is more or less a way of managing certain settings on the iPad like wifi passwords and the like that need to be common across all the devices. [↩]

Going 1:1 with iPads

In late-May I received an interesting call from our deputy superintendent who told me about a local community group that was curious about putting iPads into a middle school. Specificaly, they wanted to start a three-year, phased-in implementation where, at the end of three years, students at all three grade levels would have iPads. Their goal was really just to see what we could do; what would happen.

I had spent my first two years as principal creatively getting as much technology into the school as possible: MacBook carts, iPads, iPod Touches, Apple TVs… Whenever I had the financial resources and a teacher demonstrated an aptitude and interest, I’d do what I could to make it happen. I didn’t set up an “application process” or create any hoops to jump through. I wanted to empower teachers to try something new and different. And it was starting to work.

I can only assume that all of this had not gone unnoticed because when my deputy superintendent called me she asked something like, “Are you sitting down?” She then proceeded to tell me about this iPad opportunity and how she felt I was the principal to take this on.

I met with the board of the foundation the next week and they explained in more detail their vision. I guess I did a fair job of telling them what I thought we could do at my school because the very next day my deputy superintendent called back and told me to sit down again. The foundation, she said, wanted to do a whole-school, 1:1 implementation right out of the gate and they were going to find the funds to make it happen.

Now, during all this time, none of this was set in stone. It was a handshake here, an email there, and I didn’t believe it was real until the last week in July. In a perfect world, I’d have had the last week of school to share the news and all summer for teachers to play with iPads and get comfortable. I’d had none of that. My leadership team were the only ones who knew about the possibility, but all of us were pretty tight-lipped about it until I went before the Board of Education on August 1, 2012, to take questions along with our Director of Curriculum & Instruction.

The BoE was supposed to vote two weeks later, but voted unanimously on the spot to support the project. They asked a lot of questions and, honestly, I was so nervous I don’t remember many of them. I remember them asking the usual and expected questions about how this would help student achiement, what would happen if one got lost, stolen, or broken, and how the cost would be covered.

As of Wednesday night, we are officially the second 1:1 iPad public school in Colorado, I figured I’d better start writing some of this down for my own reflection and so others might benefit. So far it’s been an incredible ride!

Convening a Professional Study Group

Our scores on state tests are not great. Overall, about 65% of our students are proficient in reading and writing and fewer than 40% are proficient in math. These are based on scores on state tests, sure. I will be the first to point out to parents, staff, and colleagues that state tests present a very narrow, very short-sighted view of what our students know and are able to do. While they may not be everything, it’s tough to dismiss data like this as nothing.

In my vast 19 months of experience as a school principal, I have made an observation. Many schools, when placed (or even faced with the prospect of being placed) on an “Improvement Plan”1, go into full-on panic/fight or flight mode. In that mode, some teachers and leaders will do anything to get above whatever “magic line” means that they will be off watch2. We pay ridiculous fees to textbook and content providers for intervention curricula and software. We remove kids from classes they love like band and art and “double-dip” them in classes they dislike and perform poorly in.

Strategies like these, in my opinion, are short-sighted. They focus on the specific goal of no longer being on an Improvement Plan.

I want more for my students and my school.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about what I called “Academic Alignment.” I want to put into place a long-range, sustainable plan for my school that goes far beyond playing the state-testing numbers game. In order to do this, we need a plan. This plan, however, cannot come from only me. There are too many highly intelligent and committed educators in my school who want to be involved in the process of making things better. I did not bring a “rescue plan” to my staff. Instead, I tried to lay out a vision for what this school can become. I shared that I want our school culture to be one of learning and high-level academics — a place that is 100% about kids and ensuring that they have the tools at their disposal to be successful in school and in life.

Our approach to this has been to establish a “Professional Study Group.” On Monday, we had about a dozen teachers come together to talk about what we want to give our students. With that as a baseline, we will move forward over the coming months and establish a plan to bring that to reality. I framed three critical areas and posed a couple of essential questions under each. At our first meeting, participants brainstormed “world cafe” style, in each of the three areas. Moving forward, I imagine having participants become more specialized into one of the areas.

How will it go? I don’t know. But at the very least I am hoping to harness the power of a motivated group of colleagues to help get this moving and spread the word.

  1. That’s what we call it in Colorado. Fill in your state’s vernacular here. [↩]
  2. Again, every state refers to this academic purgatory using different, but equally draconian, terminology. [↩]