A checklist for a principal: What recent books have influenced your school's procedures?

An interview is an opportunity for me to learn more about your school.

Are you open to using these procedures?

projects portfolios

digital portfolios                           team teaching

cross-discipline planning (one project for several classes)

The flipped classroom (lectures on video, class time for discussion and elaboration of the themes in the lectures)

controlled / limited / careful use of social media for academic purposes

smart use of the Internet

Do you have teachers who used to be in business or other professions?             

Penpals with other schools

peer mentoring by teachers (Finnish style "open door" observation)

internships and mentors (links with community for mentoring and volunteers)

after school hours?   The "community school"        

Are your students asked to help keep the school clean and organized?  (some schools have extra brooms available to sweep and dust the classrooms)

Do any of these authors inform your procedures?

Malcolm Gladwell  10,000 hours (Outliers)

Blink

Dan Pink:   Drive (autonomy, mastery, purpose, Fedex day)

To Sell is Human (the new elevator pitch)

A Whole New Mind (Conceptual age, Automation, Asia, Abundance)

Thomas Friedman The World is Flat

Seth Godin  Purple Cow

Let's clean our school

Students serve the food

It's lunchtime

Food is cooked in a central kitchen and delivered to schools.
The students distribute the food, plates and silverware

Add caption

time to eat

clean the dishes

recycling

brush teeth after lunch

Kids rate their own performance

slippers when you go into the restroom (so the germs in the restroom
stay on the soles of the shared slippers) ... It's better to share slippers
than to bring the germs from the restroom into the rest of the school

Put on slippers to walk around the inside of the school

The community school -- open from 7 am to ??

How to spread an idea: Find an article, send the weblink, and paste the article in the email, too.

Here's how I spread an idea:
I collect three interesting articles, then read the 10 books that are the references in those articles, then I create an ebook and six months later the product is ready for me to send to my friends.  it's 73 pages long and nobody writes back.


Here's how my wife spreads an idea:
She emails the link to 43 friends and gets messages like:

Cooool!! 

I am so thankful you sent this to me!!!  Soooo happy to know this had you thinking of me. 

xo 

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Huh?  She spends 30 seconds sending an article and she gets people to read.
I spend six months carefully crafting my words to inspire pople to look at an interesting and helpful article by creating a youtube and a poster to explain the article.

Who is the more-effective teacher trainer?   My wife, of course.

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So, what can we conclude?

a) Teachers have short attention spans.

b)  People in general have short attention spans.

c)  John Green uses rapid changing graphics, trick video, audio enhancements, and he keeps his history lectures shorter than 10 minutes.   "I see the eyes of my students wandering, even after three minutes," says Dennis Yuzenas, a high school teacher in West Palm Beach, Fla.  See his website WhatDoYaKnow.com.

d) I need to develop teacher training that is interactive.   The ultimate in interactive is "Call me when you have finished this video and let's talk."

I call this method Visual and Active Teacher Training
Professional Development
One-Person-At-A-Time
The "Guide on the Side" model

Here are some topics

• Cooperative Teaching and Learning

• Integration of the Arts

• Advisories

• Personal Learning Plans

• Portfolios and Portfolios 

• Interviews

• Multiple Domain Assessments

• End-of-Year Exhibitions

• Eighth Grade Internships

• Capstone Projects

See a future post to see how we have addressed these topics in short 3-minute (or less) training videos.

So, have I changed my behavior?  My usual approach to sharing infomration is to make an ebook and a video.  So I changed what I do now.  I grab a link, take a screen shot of one page in the link, and email the link and the screen shot.   Here's what one of my readers wrote to me:

Subject: RE: a nice story about Danielle the realtor 

I loved the story!  Thank you!  It sounds like a really good book!  Amazing!

Victory!   Here is an example of the 30-second model