Tag: professional development

3 Leadership Books for Teachers

Teachers are the leaders of their classrooms. Now, this may seem obvious (who else would be in charge?), so let me explain. Teachers are responsible for the execution of classroom objectives and the development of their students. In a healthy school, they are given the freedom and responsibility, within a broader structure of administrative oversight, to make key decisions pertaining to how they will empower their students to learn and grow. For example, a teacher responsible for teaching The Great Gatsby must consider how the book will be taught, what she will focus on, and how she intends for students

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So, You Think You Want to be a Principal…

School Principal Job Description Unclogging toilets and mopping up sewage in the restrooms of your new facility Setting up hundreds of chairs for an event on your own because you know you can’t ask any more of your teachers or volunteers Subbing for Calculus one day and Kindergarten the next, outside of your comfort zone and with unclear lesson plans Kindly mediating an hour and a half long meeting with a teacher and an unhappy set of parents who will likely leave the school Trying to keep track of complicated budgets for various areas of the school, when you’ve got

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Practicing Peacefulness: Beginning the School Year in the Right Frame of Mind

With the start of school just around the corner, teachers are gearing up for another year. As usual, summer break has gone by too fast. And yet, at the same time, the attraction of new beginnings lures them back to the classroom. There is something about a fresh start that energizes, awakens, and inspires.  How can teachers approach this year in a way that is different from the past? Experienced teachers may have a good idea at this point what their growth goals are for the year. To be sure, taking inventory of one’s skill in the craft of teaching

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Growth in the Craft: Fresh Techniques for Your Teaching Tool Belt

The sole true end of education is to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain. Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning” As educators, we get excited when classrooms come alive: Hands shoot up. Eyes brighten. And body language across the room broadcasts that discovery is underway.  The other day I stepped in to sub for our science teacher and experienced a fresh taste of these kinds of moments. The class had been studying insects all semester and the topic of the day was beetles. Now, my background is

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Teachers are Leaders: 6 Principles of Leadership for Schools

A teacher is a leader. Truly, a teacher is many things, but my contention in this article is that a teacher is fundamentally a leader. To the extent this contention is true, it behooves us to consider not only what it means to be a leader, but also to clarify a set of leadership principles that can enhance the effectiveness of teachers in fulfilling their calling. Leadership has been studied from many angles in an attempt to delineate all the factors that make great leaders. While there are common threads among all the different schools of thought, a singular definition

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Good to Great: Attracting the Right Teachers

In my previous article, I introduced a new series on how insights from Jim Collins’ Good to Great (New York: Harper Business, 2001) might apply to schools. In his book, Collins and his team of researchers study eleven companies that achieved exceptional results over a long period of time in relation to their comparison peers. Through his research, Collins and his team distilled seven characteristics of these great companies, each of which he claims are implementable across industry lines. A few years later, Collins wrote Good to Great and the Social Sectors (2005). In this companion monograph, Collins draws out

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Building a Strong Faculty Culture

Schools are interesting organizations, to say the least. They may vary in leadership structures and governance policies, but they all contain the same core groups of constituents: students, parents, faculty and staff members, administrators, board members, and donors. Of these groups, which is most critical for the success of the school? While a compelling case could be made for each one of them, I have come to believe that the answer is faculty. Faculty are the front line workers and first responders of the school. They are not only expected to interface with school customers (parents) on a regular basis.

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“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 2: Teacher-Driven Professional Development

There are two general approaches to professional development in education, one that is supervisor-driven and the other that is teacher-driven. In the supervisor-driven approach, the principal or dean is the primary driver for teacher development. The principal sets the goals, schedules observations, provides feedback, and identifies future growth areas. The strength of this approach is that it puts the responsibility of developing teachers on administrators, field experts who have been on their journey as educators long enough to develop a general sense of best practices to pursue and pitfalls to avoid. The notable weakness of the supervisor-driven approach is that

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a classroom, a common setting for practicing education

Practicing Education: Growing in the Art of Teaching

When I was a child I did gymnastics, and one of the most fundamental aspects of gymnastics is practice. We practiced skills and routines, we stretched and we worked out for hours, far longer than the average sports team practices. Where your average soccer team practiced an hour or an hour and a half a couple times a week, gymnasts practice three hours at a stretch at least three times a week. And that’s at my American gym which was no doubt less intense than some. One of the biggest lessons I learned from my coach was his frequent saying,

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