Monthly Archives: August 2008

Storytelling for leaders

I signed up for Scott’s book study this summer, and believe it or not I did read the book. I also logged into the forums a few times and read some of the discussion of Influencer. I just had a bit crazier of a summer than I’d intended and didn’t get to participate as actively as I’d hoped.

One of the biggest things I got from the book was the power of effective storytelling in influencing others. For those looking to tell great stories, I wanted to share something else I stumbled upon this summer.

The Moth is a not-for-profit storytelling organization that started more than 10 years ago as a small group of folks who would gather to spin tales on a friend’s porch. I’ve subscribed to the podcast and have a great 10-20 minute story delivered to my iTunes each week. Some of them are not appropriate for classroom use, but many are. If nothing else, they demonstrate the power of a well-told story — something that all of us school leaders could stand learn a lot from as we write the next chapter in the story of our own organizations.

Service with a smile

Every time you interact with a customer, you’re engaging in marketing. – Seth Godin

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s receiving or giving lousy customer service. We don’t put up with it at the Olive Garden or the Starbucks, and we sure as heck shouldn’t expect our customers to put up with it from us.

Schools walk a precarious line with parents and the community. Generally, they like us OK. But then one little thing goes wrong and that’s it. They tell a friend or two how crummy our school is and that friend also tells a friend or two. Pretty soon everyone’s working on the assumption that your school is an unfriendly place because someone didn’t get the satisfaction they wanted.

I’m not talking about overtly bad customer service like being rude or snippy with someone, although that shouldn’t be acceptable, either. But sometimes the little things we do (or don’t do) and the hidden messages our offices and classrooms send speak louder than words. In one of my all-time favorite posts by Scott McLeod, he points out the subtle (and not-so-subtle) messages we send out to our teachers, parents, students, and community every day.

Consider the mother of a teenager in need of some last-minute advice from the student’s counselor. She walks into the counseling office and the secretary’s desk proudly displays that oh-so-witty sign that says, “Failure to plan on your part does not constitute and emergency on mine.”

Or consider the dad who comes in to review his student’s attendance. He is told by the first person he sees, “That’s not my responsibility. You need to see the Attendance Person.” So he dutifully goes to the attendance office only to find that the Attendance Person is at lunch. Approaching the nearest counselor he is told, “Your son is not in my part of the alphabet. You need to see Mr. Y and he’s booked all afternoon.” Down but not out, the father walks to the administrative offices and is told that his son is a senior and therefore he needs to see Mrs. Z who happens to be out of the building at that moment.

Now consider that pulling up Little Johnny’s attendance would have been about three mouse clicks for that first person. Why do we do this to people? Are we so afraid of stepping on someone else’s turf? Or is that we resent having to do “someone else’s job?”

Taking care of our parents and community is all of our jobs. As school leaders, we contribute significantly to the culture of the building. When people see us stop and pick up a piece of trash on the floor, it sends the message that we’re not too important to do our part to keep the building clean. When others see us stop to help a lost or confused parent in the building, they get the idea that we all need to take responsibility for taking care of the people visiting our school.

Empower the people in your building to do what is required (with consideration for what’s ethical and appropriate) to help a parent. Doing so will stop the game of parent “hot potato” that we play by bouncing these people from one person to the next. And even if they’re not happy with the result of the conversation (Johnny has missed how many math classes?!?), the parents will leave with at least a little bit of dignity as well as some satisfaction that someone took the time to listen and help.

Get your life back, Part 3

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve captured what you need to do and set up a system to help you actually do it. But what about those odds and ends that you may need to revisit? Those little doodles, emails, handouts, or reference documents that you are just certain you’ll need agan?

As I indicated up front, I have untrained myself from the old habit of scribbling notes during meetings. Instead, I capture things that need to be done; actions that need to be taken. Yet I still find myself staring at piles of stuff that may need a home for some unforeseen time in the future when someone might ask me for it. Old meeting agendas, handouts, memos from the district, and the like.

For me, stuff like this breaks down into two basic categories:

Electronic Stuff

  • Emails with information that may not be immediately important but may be important later. Dates for trainings for teacher mentors, for instance. I don’t need it now, but may need it when an interested teacher approaches me about mentoring.
  • Other important documents you may need access to later. We have an emergency phone tree at my school, for example. Or maybe you got a PDF of a workshop registration attached to an email.
  • PDFs or other articles you keep meaning to read. I receive a lot of publications via email. Many of them are compilations of articles from around the web and there are always a few I’d like to read at some magical point in the future, “when I have the time.”

evernote1Evernote has become my digital dumping ground. Enough has been written about Evernote that I’m not going to spend a lot of time on what it does or how it works, rather I’m going to share with you how I make it work for me.

I keep a few notebooks for various purposes. I try to keep stuff that is work-related in its own notebook. In my “LHS Reference” notebook, you’ll find math content standards and frameworks, an emergency phone tree, and a list of important district phone numbers.  If I see an article I like, I ask Firefox to print it as a PDF and dump the PDF into my “Articles & Papers” notebook. Receipts for, well, anything get dumped into “Receipts” and anything without a clearly defined place goes into “Random Stuff.”

I recommend starting with one giant notebook and letting things happen organically. For instance, I think I’m going to have another notebook eventually called “Recipes” where I save recipes I come across online.

Non-Electronic Stuff

For stuff that doesn’t exist in electronic format (handouts, whiteboards from great brainstorming sessions, completed classroom observation instruments, etc), my first question is usually whether I can get it into electronic format (and whether I’d want to). One of these days I’ll get a Fujitsu ScanSnap, but until then I have a few other tricks up my sleeve.

Print“For handouts, I ask the hander-outer if they can email a copy to me or, “Put it on the wiki.” If it’s an Office document – or anything non-PDF – I’ll turn it into a PDF (this functionality is trivial on a Mac). For whiteboards I’ll shoot a picture or two with my iPhone. Both the PDFs and digital images can get dumped into Evernote where it will happily scan all the legible text and make even digital pictures of my whiteboard searchable.

But, alas, there are some things that just don’t make the jump to digital. For instance, I don’t have the time or the need to scan all the data-collection instruments I use for classroom observations. I have a folder for each teacher I evaluate and the instruments go in there. Once I complete a summative evaluation, I usually shred the instruments and move on.

As I mentioned in my very first post in this series, I don’t keep a lot of random stuff in hard copy format if I can avoid it. Having reference items in Evernote makes them easy to search and access if and when I need them.

Putting it together

We’ve come a long way from capture, to action, to filing away stuff you may need to get your hands on at some future time. Regardless of the system you put in place for yourself, make sure it’s something you can stick with and that it becomes a transparent part of your daily routine. The less you have to think about it the better.

By spending some time up front deciding how you plan to capture, act, and file you can free up your valuable time for other things. Plus you’ll feel less stressed because you’ll know you have at least some of your world under control.

Previously

Growing your own

The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. – Ralph Nader

As a school leader, what have you done to cultivate teacher leadership in your building?

I don’t mean having your administrative intern handle all of your referrals this semester so that you have time for “more important things.”

How much have you invested in the teacher leaders in your school? Are you inviting them to share their practices — their successes and failures — with their colleagues? Are you encouraging others to listen to what they say? Are you listening?

Remember that not all leaders have titles.

Part 2b

In what can only be described as serendipitously good timing, Merlin Mann of 43Folders gets to the heart of writing doable, next actions using outcome-based thinking.

Think about the thing that’s most on your mind right now. It’s probably not the thing you think is most on your mind; the stuff that’s really getting our attention likes to run behind the refrigerator whenever we turn the lights on. But, anyway. Got it? Okay.

Merlin walks through a simple example that neatly illustrates the kind of broad items most of us end up capturing and how to recognize that what you’ve really got is an action and a project. While far more articulate about this stuff than I am, Merlin makes the point I was shooting for yesterday.

Get your life back, Part 2

So you’ve read Part 1. You’ve been a good little capturer. But now it’s time to actually get something done.

Let’s get all those items you’ve captured into some kind of task-management system so you can actually do them.

You want me to do what, again?

You’ve most likely captured a task at a pretty basic level. For instance:

Schedule meeting with district tech person to discuss teacher blogs Plan new teacher lunch for next Friday Call Jeff’s mom about his lousy attendance Email superintendent about idea for saving $1.5 million Buy filters for my son’s aquarium

One of the first things you’ll notice is that I try to begin all of my captured items with action words. Schedule, plan, call, email, buy. It’s a lot easier to see what you have to do when you can see what you have to do. Writing “Jeff – attendance” doesn’t tell me what it is that I need to actually do. Nor does “teacher blogs.”

Fleshing it out.

So you’ve got some input items, but clearly they lack substance. So the next thing to do when I get a minute is to enter these items from wherever they were captured into my task-management system. Right now, that’s Things from Cutured Code, but you could use anything that works for you. Dan Meyer uses a Google Spreadsheet, Patrick Rhone loves his notebooks, some enjoy using 3×5 cards or the Hipster PDA, and still others are attached to homebrew, paper-based systems.

Whatever your pleasure, it’s time to get your action items where they belong. I’m not a strict drinker of the GTD Kool-Aid so this is what I’ve found that works for me. I have three basic places where I do things: Home, Work, and Shopping. So look at the most logical place for each item and put it on the appropriate list — real or virtual.

As you’re putting them in the correct list (GTD die-hards would call these “contexts” — and most folks have far more than I), you also need to make sure you don’t have any multi-step items masquerading as action items. For instance, “Plan new teacher lunch for next Friday,” is not a “do-able” item. It probably has some other things that go along with it like “Check availability of conference room,” “Call restaurant and order food,” “Send invite to teachers and principal,” and “Print and copy agenda.” Once all those things are done, you will be able to check off that item. I (and others) refer to any action that has multiple steps as a “project.” I usually have several of these going at any one time.

Get on with it.

So you’ve captured everything, decided the specific actions you need to take, and identified multiple-step items as projects. Then you’ve placed them in the context where they’re most likely to be completed. Sounds simple, right? But in practice it takes some discipline to religiously capture everything and process it into the right list.

Making ubiquitous capture and efficient processing a part of your daily routine should help you make maximum use of your time at work, allowing you to plow through the drudgery and leaving time for the stuff you really want to be doing while you’re there.

Club Two-Oh

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. — John Quincy Adams, 6th president (1767-1848)

Funny how a blog post I didn’t even mean to share has inspired me (and others, too!) to make a commitment to spend more time in the classroom.

Sure, 20 walk-throughs per week can seem like a lot, but here is where the math geek in me takes over. Even at ten minutes each, that’s 200 minutes per week. In a 5-day week, that’s 40 minutes per day. Less time than I usually spend answering emails that, arguably, are not as important as what’s going on in classrooms. Oh yeah, and this year I’m teaching a class, too. But I know that I can do it.

Besides, if I am not doing this job to spend time with teachers and students working on instruction, then why am I there at all?

If you’re a school-based administrator and would like to take up this challenge, let’s see your commitment in the comments and/or on your own blog (if you have one). No one will be pounding on your door if you fall off the wagon, but if you put your name in writing down below you’ll feel committed and supported. Like so many challenges, sometimes things are easier if you have others to keep you on track.

Since the math teachers around here appear to need some specific parameters, in my case a classroom visit shall be considered one of the 20 if and only if:

  • I actually enter the classroom (window shopping does not count), and
  • the time spent actually inside the classroom is at least 5 minutes (no “just passing through” visits).

I will also make an effort to connect informally with at least half of the teachers whom I see.

Funny thing, though – cheating on these is really only cheating yourself. It’s like lying about your diet by not counting the calories in that Snickers bar you inhaled. Sure you can look puzzled to your friends, family, and doctor about why you’re not losing weight, but you know why.

Get your life back, Part 1

Inspired by both Mr. Meyer‘s “How I Work” video as well as another side project to which I contribute, I thought I’d open the new year with a series of posts that highlight some of the tools and strategies that I use to stay on top of things. You know – keep it light. After all, it’s still technically summer.

Anyone who needs to be productive on a daily basis needs to look hard at three important aspects of their lives: managing inputs, doing stuff, and remembering stuff. Today I’m going to take a look at the first of this trio: Managing your inputs.

“Incoming!“

Everyone — teachers, administrators, students — has a constant stream of information coming at them all day long. Remember this, do that, check on this, follow-up with that, etc.

Like others, I’ve noticed that my brain is not exactly the best, most reliable repository for information. I’ll illustrate with a pretty common scenario.

I’m walking down the hall after herding the lovelies into their next class. Here comes the Media Specialist: “Scott, I need you to make sure you let the new teachers know that we are planning a training for our email client after school on Thursday!” Makes sense. I’m responsible for the new teachers in the building. I can do this. I’ll just send off an email when I get back to my office.

I start sauntering back to my office chanting, “New teachers. Email training. Thursday.” Who needs a Hipster PDA? Uh oh. Here comes one of our department chairs. “Hey, Scott. Remember that presentation you did on preparing slide decks that engage students? Yeah – can you email me that? I’d like to use some of your ideas!” Of course! I’ll get right on it just as soon as I email the new teachers about… Ummm… That thing on Thursday. Or is it Friday? In the library? After school? Oh crap.

You can see how the system begins to break down. And this doesn’t even touch on the stuff that comes out of our weekly administrative meetings where we discuss professional development and the general day-to-day operation of the building.

I’ve never been one of those people who could carry a pen and paper everywhere, so for these kinds of “chance” requests, I’ll use my iPhone. If someone approaches me with something that needs to be done I’ll pull out the phone, open up my productivity program of choice (currently vacillating between OmniFocus and Things) , and drop it into the Inbox for processing later. If you subscribe to Remember the Milk, you can text message a Twitter to @rtm and it will zip right into your RTM inbox. If that’s not a mouthful I don’t know what is! Alternately, if I’m driving, I can phone my brain dump into Jott – a speech-to-text service I’ve been using for quite a while.

Meeting of the minds.

I hate taking notes in meetings. I bet you do, too. We do it, however, because it seems like the expected behavior. We all went to school, right? And when the Person In Charge started speaking — whether about the French-Indian War or factoring polynomials — we started writing. We’re well trained.

What bugged me most about taking meeting notes was that I’d never, ever look at them again. I’d file them away thinking, “OK. If anyone asks me what Bill said about new dry erase boards at Monday’s meeting I’ll be ready!” But no one ever asked. Not once.

A couple years ago I came across a great tidbit that liberated me from the compulsive urge to try to scribble down everything in a meeting. It was a post at Behance about their “Action Method.” In short, you should be primarily focused on capturing action steps; stuff that we need to actually do. You don’t have to write down every single piece of information discussed.

“During a brainstorm, meeting, or on the run, ideas arrive in a flurry of other activity and can be lost unless they are captured and transformed into action steps.”

The method’s third component frees me of the guilt of not archiving every single piece of information I receive: “File reference items. Sparingly.” That’s it! What do I do with that binder of notes we have from our monthly department meetings? Throw it out! That folder full of notes scribbled at the professional development workshop you attended in the late-90s? Trash it.

For notes during meetings, I’m definitely a low-tech guy. I have a Levenger letter-sized Circa notebook that holds all the aspects of my non-digital work life. Into the Circa goes any actions that I capture during the meeting. When I’m back in my office, I scan the list and move any relevant items into OmniFocus so they’re available to me at my desk or on my iPhone. Having them digitally enables me to adjust due dates and priorities as well as move them around as needed.

If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me.

Phone calls are a fact of life for most of us, and school-based administrators are no different. Whether it’s a parent calling to request that I fire a math teacher, a district administrator calling to check the status of our school improvement plan, or my wife calling to make sure I pick up diapers on the way home, I take in a lot of information from the phone.

For phone calls, I’ve adopted a one 3×5 card per call/issue method. When I get a call I immediately reach for a blank card and a pen. I’ll immediately date the card and write down the caller’s name and number. If the card requires some action on my part, I’ll do it immediately (if practical and possible) and get back to the caller. Most of these things don’t require entry into OmniFocus because they’re be as simple as “Excuse Johnny’s absence for last Friday. He had a tummy ache.” If they’re bigger (“Set up a conference with the math teacher and the counselor to determine why Andrea can’t seem to remember to go to Trigonometry.”), I may shoot off an email to both parties and put the item in OF to remind make sure I remember to get back to the parent once I hear from the teacher and counselor.

When I’ve finished dealing with an issue, I’ll throw the cards into an old-school 3×5 box arranged chronologically. That way if Mrs. Johnson calls again and says, “Remember when I spoke to you last month about the mean lunch lady?” I can quickly reference that card in my file.

Three-pronged attack.

So those are the basics of my approach to capturing stuff that needs doing. For stand-up meetings in the hallway, I’ll shoot ‘em directly into iPhone. During meetings, I’ll dedicate a page in my Circa to capturing actionable items only. And for phone calls, I use one index card per call or issue.

When you’re capturing items into your inbox, be it physical or electronic, make sure to free yourself from thinking about due dates, projects, contexts, resources, timelines, priorities, etc. and just get the item captured. You’ll deal with the other stuff later.

After years of hacking away at things little by little, I feel like I’ve finally arrived with a system that lets me get things done without worrying that I’m missing something.

Now what?

Assuming you can manage what information is important to you and filter out the stuff that doesn’t require some kind of action on your part, what you should be asking next is, “Now that I’ve got a plan for capturing stuff I need to do, how do I actually make the time to do it?”

The message today is to recognize that you just can’t trust your well-meaning brain to remember important stuff. You’ve got too much coming your way during the day for that. Get it out of your head. Get all of it completely out of your head. That way your brain can focus on solving that whole global warming thing or dreaming up ways to improve the economy.

Coming up: Now that it’s all out of your head, it’s time to start actually doing something with it.


Photo Credits: “file cabinets” by h. wren “Bat Phone” by Phillie Casablanca

Up and out

No good decision was ever made in a swivel chair. — George S. Patton, Army general (1885-1945)

So here it is. I’m going to put it out there and be accountable to you.

Beginning with the first week of school, I will visit a minimum of 20 classrooms per week, not including formal observations. That’s roughly four classrooms per day. It sounds like a lot when you say it that way, but for a 5-10 minute walk-through, that’s only about 40 minutes per day maximum.

Why have I found it so hard to make this happen? I always start out strong, but things break down some time around Novemeber or December. I suppose I could make the typical excuse. After all, it’s easy to get bogged down pushing papers, checking email, and returning voicemails.

But that’s not really a good excuse, is it?