Tag: education

What’s the Good Word?

By Amy C. Colley, Ed.D.
Executive Director, SURN

Happy New Year, SURN friends and supporters! As we move toward the end of the semester, many of you are collecting data, taking stock, and planning ahead. Me too!

As leaders it’s easy to get bogged down and feel fragmented mid-school year. Thankfully, the calendar year changes too, and we are reminded of the opportunity to re-set and focus our intentions on our aspirations, creating for ourselves some accountability measures and asking others to join us as we move forward. For the past several years, I’ve chosen a word of the year, prompted by Lisa Nelson’s blog at See In Colors. Her template allows me to print, draw and post my word of the year.

This year’s word is PERSIST.

Persist

Implicit in the very definition is the need to carry on, to see something through, despite obstacles, failures, and difficulty. Our work as education leaders during times of accelerated change is challenging, and yet we know we must keep moving forward for our students and the future of learning. I will persist.

What’s your word for the year? What will move you forward with purpose? Think about it and if you choose a word, share it with us!

Categories
Resources

Jennifer Abrams Helps Us Use Our Best Voice

By SURN Staff

SURN leaders often share the need to continue developing human resources skills and competencies as they strive to cultivate collaborative cultures. This means communicating well, crossing generational divides, and leveraging conflict. We are pleased that Jennifer Abrams, international communications and educational consultant, will join us at the 22nd annual Leadership Conference this year.

Jennifer Abrams is a communications and education consultant and author.
Jennifer Abrams is a communications and education consultant and author.

Jennifer brings a dynamic keynote based on her popular workshop, Swimming in the Deep End – What Does It Take, to open the day Tuesday, June 19. “No matter what role we play in a school or district, we all want to make a difference. However, things move fast in education these days, and often in our communications we are left confused, overwhelmed and not as successful as we could be. We need to build up a skill set of effective decision making capabilities, ‘resistance management’ communication strategies and for the sake of our health, our ‘stress tolerance (Abrams, 2018).’” Additionally, Jennifer will lead a concurrent session later that morning.

Jennifer’s books are best-sellers. In Having Hard Conversations, Jennifer leads us through replicable processes as we navigate work-related difficult situations as leaders. The sequel, Hard Conversations Unpacked: The Whos, the Whens, and the What-Ifs, takes readers on a deeper dive into the nuanced world of communication. The Multigenerational Workplace: Communicate, Collaborate, and Create Community provides readers with tools for navigating beyond their personal “generational filters” as they lead.

We hope you’ll join us as we learn from Jennifer Abrams and our other esteemed presenters at this year’s conference. You will leave with tools, resources, and experiences designed to enhance your leadership performance.

A little more about Jennifer: Jennifer considers herself a “voice coach,” helping others learn how to best use their voices – be it collaborating on a team, presenting in front of an audience, coaching a colleague, supervising an employee and in her new role as an advisor for Reach Capital, an early stage educational technology fund. Jennifer holds a Master’s degree in Education from Stanford University and a Bachelor’s degree in English from Tufts University. She lives in Palo Alto, California (www.jenniferabrams.com/about/).

 

What are you letting go of in 2018?

Guest post by Jane Core Yatzek

As we welcomed in a New Year, many of us participated in the age-old tradition of creating New Year’s Resolutions.  I have set goals over the years for more sleep, more exercise, more time with those I love, more professional reading, more of any number of things.  But as we find ourselves in March – almost 12 weeks into the year – I am looking at resolutions that are sagging in progress or worse have been forgotten.  I find myself wondering what about less?

With the same 24 hours a day in 2018 that you had in 2017, you are not going to have more time for anything unless you have less of something else.  Administrators in education today have such complex jobs – they are data analysts, organizational managers, team motivators, vision setters, all while acting as in loco parentis for hundreds of students daily.  How can you possibly let go of something?

Research has found that letting go of something or declining a request maybe the best way to get ahead as it relieves anxiety and helps us set (or reset) priorities.  Recent studies on scarcity reveal that when time gets limited we feel more pressure to take on more commitments, when realistically we should be minimizing commitments to balance our schedules.  So, if you are ready to get some of your time back, what will you try to do less of?  Here are some ideas to get you started:

*Let go of working through lunch – get up and eat lunch in a new spot without answering email, checking voice-mail, proofreading the newsletter.  You can also multi-task this “let-go” by reconnecting with a known colleague or meeting a new colleague as your lunch buddy!

*Let go of a project that you can delegate – Hate how the front bulletin board always need attention? Picture schedule needs to be redone?  After school tutoring data needs collecting? Give the basic parameters to budding teacher leaders and let their creativity fly and skills grow!

*Say “no, thank you” when someone asks you to be a part of something – and be fine with watching from afar or not watching at all.

*Need a baby step?  Try letting go of something for a week. Reflect on Friday if it can be a more permanent “less”; either way you had less of something and more time for something else for five days!

Less may very well be more, let’s spend the next part of 2018 finding out!

Jane Core Yatzeck is a doctoral student in Curriculum Leadership at William & Mary School of Education.  She has 20 years of experience in education; first as a special education and general education elementary school teacher, and then as a school administrator at the middle and elementary levels.  She can be reached at jacor2@email.wm.edu or on Twitter @jcoreyatzeck.

Resources:

https://hbr.org/2010/01/say-yes-to-saying-no

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/5_research_based_ways_to_say_no

Like this post? You might find Lisa’ Nelson’s Stop, Continue, Start visual template useful in planning. http://seeincolors.com/stop-continue-start-template-a-visual-tool-for-productivity/

The 5 Cs across the Disciplines

By Sarah P. Hylton, SURN

The Profile of a Virginia Graduate is a framework aimed at preparing our students to be life ready citizens. Positioned as part of the VDOE’s Standards of Accreditation, the Profile is the response to an essential question: “What knowledge, skills, and dispositions should a Virginia high school graduate possess?”

Focused on the four pillars of Content Knowledge, Workplace Skills, Community Engagement/Civic Responsibility, and Career Exploration, the Profile insists that creative thinking, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and citizenship – which we commonly refer to as the 5Cs – be incorporated into learning experiences in every classroom, pre-K through 12.

The 5Cs are not the purview of secondary teachers only (a common misconception given the reference to graduation in the name), nor are they intended to reside primarily in one discipline or another. Rather, this focus on the 5 Cs obliges all teachers to develop a common understanding of these skills and attributes and to understand how the 5 Cs exist across the standards and goals of the various academic disciplines.

Creating opportunities to build teachers’ capacity to incorporate these skills is the work of all school leaders. As each division considers how it will begin to implement the Profile, consider having teachers review the strands and/or goals of the various disciplines to determine where the 5Cs are mentioned in the standards of their own discipline as well as in others. Such a task should provide a good starting point for teachers to develop operational definitions of this language and will give them insight into how they are working in tandem with their colleagues to ensure that all students are developing these critical skills. Because reading, discussing, and writing with purpose in every discipline is fundamental to developing the 5Cs, further faculty conversations might center on how to offer instruction rich in these opportunities.

5cs

EPPL Goes to Washington

By Sarah P. Hylton, SURN

EPPL students take part in a policy field trip to Washington, D.C.
EPPL students take part in a policy field trip to Washington, D.C.

At SURN’s Board Meeting on Wednesday, Dr. Mike DiPaola promoted William and Mary’s EPPL cohort and its goal to develop capable school leaders. The EPPL acronym stands for educational policy, planning, and leadership, and students in the program take courses in each of these areas, ultimately synthesizing those classroom experiences during comprehensive examinations. The natural extension, of course, is how these areas will interact in their professional lives as school leaders. Students in the program are reminded often of the necessity of leaders being conscious of the policy process in order to be able to engage positively and intentionally in that process.

Students currently doing policy coursework, including SURN Graduate Assistants Jamon Flowers and Sarah Hylton, took part in a policy field trip to Washington, D.C. on October 27, 2017. The trip, organized by Dr. Pamela Eddy, provided us with the opportunity to meet with K12 and higher education interest groups and with congressional education legislative aids and staff. We were reminded of how critical it is for school leaders to envision themselves as policy actors and to foster relationships with a broad swath of individuals and organizations. Those we spoke to urged us as school leaders to know our own narrative and to use it to shape our policy goals and aspirations. Faithful commitment to the organization’s best interests framed consistently and positively serves schools leaders well as they navigate policy issues at the local, state, and even federal levels.