How to Combat the Mass Exodus of Educators
An alarming 55 percent of educators are thinking about leaving the profession earlier than they had planned (National Education Association). This includes classroom teachers and those in leadership roles. The stress and toll of the pandemic has resulted in a...
The #1 Strategy to Improving Disruptive Behavior at School
Eighty percent of our current clients (school and district leaders) desire to improve unprecedented, off-the-charts, disruptive student behavior. Since the onset of the pandemic, more than 25% of high school students reported worsening emotional and cognitive health...
What’s Your One Thing?
School leadership at the start of a school year is always eventful. This year has been particularly challenging. Instead of supporting leaders virtually, I have had the honor of working in-person with several districts in three states to participate in opening year...
Let’s Make Mistakes and Spiral!
Now is the time. We must interrogate our belief systems that are tied to education in order to move forward and BE BETTER. But what does, “be better” really mean? Educators tend to cringe when something cannot be measured and calculated, so the simple “be better” can...
The Most Crucial School Start in Educational History is Approaching
How will you respond?Now that we have identified all the educational buzz terms that this unprecedented time has created – social-emotional learning, anti-racism curriculum, trauma-informed teaching, etc. – it’s time for individual educators to determine what these...
Burning Dollars: How the Influx of Educational Funding Isn’t Helping Learners
The American Rescue Plan has distributed nearly $190 billion in Covid relief funds to reopen schools safely and support the academic and social emotional needs of K-12 students in the United States. School districts and states are making quick decisions on how to...
The Secret to Effective Formative Assessment
(Hint: It's the Same as Introspection) We’ve dug into the topic of formative assessment in depth over the past few months – what it is, what it isn’t, why educators avoid it and how to implement the process. Now knowing all those...
Getting Educators Out of Rubric Hypnosis …and into valuing culturally and linguistically responsive learning.
“Our ultimate goal as culturally responsive teachers is to help dependent learners learn how to learn. We want them to have the ability to size up any task, map out a strategy for completing it and then execute the plan. That’s...
It’s not about the activities. It’s about the learning.
Imagine telling a group of students to draw the “perfect” smiley face (and that is the only instruction given). Then after each draws their version, revealing what a “perfect” smiley face looks like. No student gets it right (naturally). They didn’t know it needed a...
The Educational F Word
There have certainly been many f words saturated in education over the last ten months for a myriad of reasons (with due cause). But there’s an f word that was present far before the pandemic… it’s formative… as in formative assessment. What’s the reason this word...