In July 2016, I’ve moved to the district office level and no longer work at a school as a principal. To make matters more complicated I work in a completely new district – most adults didn’t know who I was, and certainly none of the students knew me. I’ve always believed that relationships come first, before solid relationships the work with curriculum, classroom design, thoughtful integration of technology and anything else really can’t happen with fidelity.
Our students are our business…our bottom line…our revenue stream – they’re the reason we work in education and just because we work in the central office doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know any of them, or any of them know us. We should break the myth that the central office is the ivory tower.
I’m very guilty of this, and need to do a better job of getting out of the office and into the schools and classrooms. That is, until I get the robotics club to build me a virtual presence device like Sheldon’s:
In 2016, we learned more about how teachers feel about their profession, from the reasons why they started teaching in the first place (#1) to why they leave (#6). We learned that science students do better when teachers share stories about the struggles scientists face instead of portraying them as geniuses (#3). We’re also learning…
There’s a reason why people often forget to take a daily medication or respond to that email they’ve been meaning to send, and it can be chalked up to the gulf between intention and actually completing an action, according to new research co-written by a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign expert who studies social psychology….
When my son started middle school last month, he brought home a slew of consent forms for this that and the other. Most weren’t problematic, but one was deeply troubling to me — the consent form for the Google Education App. In accordance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the form…
The presentation is part of a new initiative at Smith, “Failing Well,” that aims to “destigmatize failure.” With workshops on impostor syndrome, discussions on perfectionism, as well as a campaign to remind students that 64 percent of their peers will get (gasp) a B-minus or lower, the program is part of a campuswide effort to…
His parents were tolerant of their making noise and rearranging the furniture. One summer he even dug up the backyard for a minigolf course. The design process was a matter of trial and error: Could he use soda cans to make the holes? What path would the ball take as it hit various obstacles? Behind…
Five years ago, University of Kentucky CTO Doyle Friskney realized that the campus’s classrooms mirrored those of other colleges: Lecture-based halls where students would sit and listen to a professor, with little interaction among one another. Something had to change, Friskney said. “Millennials don’t necessarily like lecture classrooms as well as faculty members do—they like…
