While watching the NFL playoffs, I noticed a new commercial for the Blackberry Curve. The premise is that a high school is run by a shipping company (like FedEx or UPS). A student is absent. The Blackberry call goes out among staff until "the ditcher", a plump lad stuffing his face with junk food, is quickly discovered ambling along a neighborhood sidewalk. He is effectively corralled into a panel truck and assigned detention.

Would that the school personnel in the commercial were using their smartphones to progress-monitor the student's up-to-the-minute formative assessments rather than his whereabouts.

While flipping channels, I happened upon "The Principal's Office" on schlocky TruTV. This show chronicles administrators in high schools as they dole out consequences for discipline.

At first I was intrigued. I evaluated the styles of the featured administrators. Then I recognized the students and parents, not in the physical sense but in the story sense. It seems I have heard every one of their "stories" before.

As the show went on, I grew weary of it. The stories, doling out discipline, trying to correct the paths of those adrift. Confiscating cellphones. The endless stream of excuses and lies. Suspension, detention, even paddling. Interesting at first, but it gets old fast.

Popular media upholds this image of our esteemed profession: a hard-line manager of student discipline and attendance. The high concept and high value stuff of instructional leadership is left unattended.

But let's face it: instructional leadership is the hardest part of our job. PLCs, lesson study, distributed governance, data-driven decision-making, continuous improvement, and curriculum redesign are easier said than done.

We often come to work with the best intentions of instructional leadership that get quickly shelved by the tyranny of the urgent--which is mostly discipline, mad mama drama, and bus breakdowns.

But I'm confident our little rural school is getting a lot of things right, as evidenced in this recent thoughtful morning e-mail to staff from our principal. Beth Lanning writes:

And so it goes. Lexile growth may be gold to us, but unfortunately it would never make a playoff commercial or a reality TV show.

Joe Poletti, co-pilot
Newport Elementary School
Newport, North Carolina

Posted by LeaderTalk Contributor at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

After about a decade of being an instructional technology advocate from central office/state dept/university levels, I'm a year-and-a-half into my new career twist: school-based leadership.

One thing I bring to the new job focus is the old job skillset. So, when it was time for our school to write our new school improvement plan...what better way then to leverage some of the tools I've learned along the way?

We started with a wiki to gather the brainstorms of the various teams, departments, individuals, etc in the school. Though most on staff had never used one before, I would say the majority chimed in.

I started the process by not typing the names of everyone on the leadership team. Instead, I invited team members to type their own. This small step marked the beginning of the culture shift of empowerment on this project. From there, each leadership team member took the wiki, process, and ease-of-use messages to their respective teams. The result was broad brush participation and input truly representative of the many, not the elect.

A neat feature of the wiki is the history. For instance, the goal about Globally Competitive Students had 59 iterations. The evolution is documented by these arbitrary selections from the history:

• Infancy (Nov 10)
• Growth (Nov 18)
• Maturity (Nov 25)

We refined some of our brainstormed data through polls and surveys. I used PollDaddy, housed on my wordpress blog to narrow our...

• Beliefs about Students
• Beliefs about School Community
• Professional Beliefs
• Teacher Working Conditions update

The neat thing with the polls and surveys was the quick turnaround. We were able to publish the results immediately. This lent credibility to the process.

Now we are in the process of transferring much of the raw information from the wiki, polls, and surveys into the template. We are finding that the hard work is done. And we will be to the point of wordsmithing just after the holidays.

The result of using these tools was significant. What we put in the plan truly represents the whole school, not just the leadership or leadership team. This creates ownership.

In other turns in my career, I have been a voice (just one of many in the wilderness) to advocate such tools and models of work from the perspective of central administration. And I have used the tools and processes before in the development of district and state-level plans. But the participation was always marginal and often felt contrived.

Using blogs, wikis, and poll/survey apps for an authentic purpose within the context of a school is an entirely different feel. The tools, used correctly, definitely reflect a WE environment.

WE are Newport Elementary School and this will become OUR school improvement plan.

Joe Poletti

[cross-posted at the old LeaderTalk blog (including comments)]

Posted by LeaderTalk Contributor at 6:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)