When talking about building good relationships we seldom talk about those times when we have to be critical or offer challenging feedback. As a Vice Principal I learned this from my Principal. He always said to me, “If you aren’t willing to go to the hard places, then you aren’t helping your staff or your […]
Category: Learning Conversations
Thinking about change
This was inspired by reading Chris Kennedy’s post by the same name. Chris starts his post: “With all the discussions swirling around personalized learning, and school reform, I have been thinking a lot about change, and how we do it right.” In my comment, I said: I think that the need to learn the tool […]
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An expectation of openness
On a recent post about empowering students, Gary Kern asked me a question in his comment: What are your thoughts on the structures and changes needed for teachers, especially at the older grades, to be able to foster higher levels of participation in their learning? What we really need are structures that both develop (and […]
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Connected Principals Elluminate Session on Sunday!
Well, for me it will actually be held on Monday morning… and I’m in Shanghai and will be on a Metro subway heading to Expo… so I probably won’t be joining this inaugural Connected Principals Elluminate… but it’s a great idea and I wanted to help spread the word! So, if you are interested, this […]
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Ladders, leaders, students and storytellers
I had to move to China to see the ‘ladder walk’. A man, standing on an ‘A’ frame ladder, painting a ceiling of an outdoor entrance cover had finished the section he was working on. Instead of stepping down to move the ladder, he stepped up and put one foot over to the other side […]
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Unstandardized
My father passed this on to me, (thanks dad). I love that the venue was a valedictorian speech, by someone who graduated at the top of her class. This is probably one of the best arguments I’ve heard against standardized testing and perhaps against standardizing education for the masses for that matter. It starts with […]
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Parents as partners
I firmly believe that “It takes a community to raise a child” and so without cooperation and communication between a school and their parent community, ‘we’ cannot fully support our children and their learning. That said, I often wonder about how we can more meaningfully engage parents in a way that they want to be […]
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Leadership in the digital age
This was sent to me by a good friend and mentor, (and a leader in his district). It refers to news about my school moving to a BYO Laptop program. The humour in it is that he lives in Canada and I’m in China… beyond that it speaks volumes about how important school level leadership […]
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Photosynthesis and Learning: a learning metaphor
A few weeks back I was in a Grade 9 class that was working on Lit Circles. The conversation progressed to the teacher asking, “So why do we do lit circles?” The first student to answer said, “To get an ‘A’.” I know the student well enough that I was able to interject and say, […]
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Shifting Attitudes
Have you made the Shift? Are you an agent of change? Where do you fit? This is Part III of a 3 part series. When I started this series I had an outline that I only vaguely ended up following, but I knew from the start that what I wanted to say was too much […]
