The Assistant Principal Podcast

Assistant Principal Podcast Content Episode Outline

Show title and release date: Presence

Show Description:

Ask 100 school leaders for their best piece of wisdom and the majority of respondents will likely tell you that it is all about relationships. That’s great, but how do you turn “its all about relationships” into a strategy you can execute every day? It is surprisingly simple, and if you are a regular listener, you may already know the answer. I’ll be sharing some experiences from my summer hiking trip and if you make it to the end you’ll hear three specific techniques for executing this simple strategy.

Inset Show Intro

Celebrations:

A wonderful podcast with Efrain Martinez’s Wisdom and Productivity Podcast. Efrain asks some great questions, beginning with “Who are you?” which is one of those questions that is like an onion. The podcast episode isn’t out yet, but I’ll put a link to the YouTube broadcast in the show notes.

The Big Idea

The past week has been bumpy here at Strategic Leadership Consulting and I’ve had trouble choosing a topic for this week. I’m now recording this on Monday afternoon, which means I am way behind schedule, and so I have had to make a decision. I’m not sure if I made the best choice, but regardless of the timing this should be valuable.

· Recap PW

· Highlight that I keep sharing

· Being fully present

· Malham Cove

· High Cup to Garrigil via Cross Fell, Great Dunn Fell, and Knock Fell, 20 miles, 3000 meters

· The moors

· Contentment

· The power of presence:

o See and hear what is there

o Appreciate the small beauties

· When we can see and hear people… we can serve them

· When we appreciate the small beauties… we can celebrate them

· Without any other interventions, growing others, and celebrating the numerous wins we have every day, will have powerful positive impacts on teaching. Learning, and your building culture.

· Simple, but hard

· Practices to sustain presence:

o Morning grounding and intention

o Asking the second question

o 5-minute coaching

Show Outro

Thank you for being present with me.

You can learn more about walking your leadership journey with me at https://www.frederickbuskey.com/

I look forward to seeing you again on Friday when we recap this week’s daily emails. Remember to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode.

I’m Frederick Buskey and thank you again for joining me on this episode of the Assistant Principal Podcast.

Cheers!

Wisdom and Productivity YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y717xIQNf0I

Frederick’s Links:

Email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com

Website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/strategicleadershipconsulting

Daily Email subscribe: https://adept-experimenter-3588.ck.page/ff61713840

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Hello Colleagues and welcome to another 5 for Friday episode of The Assistant Principal Podcast!

Today’s shout out goes to AJ Bianco, Vice Principal at East Brook Middle School in Hillsdale, NJ. AJ also was a contribute rot last week’s episode on veteran teachers. You may recall at the end of that show that I asked for some feedback and AJ kindly responded with these words:

I just wanted to let you know that I DID think your episode from last week was GREAT! Not only did I appreciate hearing from others, I thought you did a wonderful job breaking down the information into buckets and explaining what needs to be done to help veteran teachers. Well done my friend! Keep up the great work, and I will be checking out todays episode later tonight.

Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of September 4-8, 2023.

Guest intro

Celebrations

My story

Pam’s story

Lessons

That is this week’s Five for Friday rendition of The Assistant Principal Podcast.

Thank you for including me on your leadership journey.

You can learn more about what I do on my website at https://www.frederickbuskey.com/

Please remember to subscribe and rate this podcast. Rating the show helps others find it, and if you want to be a superfan, consider leaving a review. Again, you’ll be helping others find the show and you’ll be making me smile. And maybe you will even find yourself getting a shoutout at the top of the episode.

I’m Frederick Buskey and thank you again for joining me on this episode of the Assistant Principal Podcast. Cheers!

Frederick’s Links:

Email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com

Website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/strategicleadershipconsulting

Daily Email subscribe: https://adept-experimenter-3588.ck.page/ff61713840

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Last week’s show was about growing veteran teachers. I focused largely on the importance of relationships. At the end of the episode, I encouraged you to ask your veteran teachers three questions:o What is your teaching super-power?o What’s the biggest difference between who you are now as a teacher, and who you were when you began?o If you could get students to do one thing differently, what would it be? I recognize that some of you have been in school for several weeks while others still may have a week or so of summer left, but hopefully you have at the very least been able to reflect on those questions, and if you have not asked them of someone else, maybe you have asked them of yourself. I also stated, “next Tuesday I’ll offer some additional steps to build on what you find out.“ My intention was to provide some explicit “tips and tricks” but instead I decided to ask some of my connections on LinkedIn about their tips for working with veteran teachers. This group included administrators at all levels as well as veteran teachers. I’ve taken their feedback and put it into a tidy visual framework because… that’s what I do!

Inset Show Intro

Celebrations: My new truck! Apologies if that sounds a bit vain and materialistic, but I ordered a Ford Maverick – a minuscule size pickup, in Sept, 2022 and finally got it last week. It’s the perfect vehicle for me, able to haul mulch, lumber, and trash around our rural mountain roads and get 30 mpg on my trips to Columbia, Greensboro, and elsewhere.

The Big Idea

Today’s episode takes place in two acts. In Act I I’m going to smash the stereotype of the veteran teacher being a curmudgeon or burned-out resistor. Remember that change begins within, and the first step in working with experienced teachers is reframing how you perceive them. In Act II I’ll present a simple 4-stage framework for working with veteran teachers.

Act I: You don’t know me

Change… trauma… change

Sure, it’s not all been bad, but if you have been in this profession very long you have experienced change, trauma, and more change. First the change…

I began teaching in 1988, so I would be beginning my 35th year had I remained in p-12 education. You may be working with a few teachers who began teaching in that same year, or perhaps in the early 90’s, and education has changed dramatically. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that weren’t around when I began my teaching career. No:

· Standardized tests

· Computers in classrooms

· Laptops

· Cell phones

· Social media

· Canned or structured teaching programs

Principals were paid to manage things and instructional leadership was largely in the hands of teachers. There were far fewer grand initiatives, and teachers were largely expected to close their doors and teach. And although teachers were not above being questioned or criticized, it was nothing like what it is today. This might not be a universal experience, but it was my experience.

So, point 1, veteran teacher possess a sense of history and have experienced profound – profound – changes over the course of their careers. For many of them, in many ways, the profession they find themselves in now is not the profession they entered.

Now the trauma…

I believe that teaching is the greatest profession in the world. Not necessarily in its current condition, but the ability to transform live and enrich the future is unparalleled. That said, teaching can be a traumatic endeavor. Trauma can occur in conflicts between teachers and the students and families they serve, the form of trauma that is most pertinent to our discussion is trauma with administration. Especially around the teacher observation and evaluation process.

The average tenure of a middle school principal in the US is 3-5 years. As a 35-year veteran teacher, on average, I have had 7-12 principals, and countless assistant principals. Think about this… Seven times new “leaders” have come into my school, brought their vision, changed school culture, asked me to buy-in, and then they have left. More than likely, some of those principals have acted like this was their school, not my school. And in their quest to stamp their identity on the school, they may have erased part of my identity, even erased part of my school.

In addition, with so many leaders cycling through, it is very likely that most experienced teachers have had at least one very negative – traumatizing – experience with an administrator. Imagine, having pride in your craft, having invested years in working with kids, receiving solid evaluations year after year, and then someone with half your experience comes in and tells you not only that you need to get better, but that they know better than you how your craft needs to improve! Seriously?

And maybe things are very different today, but two decades ago is was not that uncommon to have administrators who yelled at teachers. Not a lot of them, but they were out there – and many experienced teachers have experienced a humiliating dressing down at the hands of a petty tyrant.

Please, I’m not throwing you under the bus, but understand, not all administrators are like you. A few are great, most are good, but there are some bad administrators out there and when a teacher has had 7, 12, or more principals, and maybe another 7, 12, or more assistant principals, the chances are high that one of them – and that’s all it takes to create trauma – one of them, was bad. Maybe even very bad.

That brings us to the third part of Act I, change. The change in part 1 was about how education has changed (no cell phones, no social media, can you imagine?) The change in part 3 is about the change process, more specifically the fascination with the flavor of the month. In our quest for improvement, we can often get dazzled by the next best thing. I’m speaking from experience here. I’m one of those visionary leaders, and if I didn’t have people to keep me firmly tethered to the ground I would jump from one change to another at light speed.

Just think about the changes in reading instruction over the past three decades:

· Phonics

· Whole Language

· Balanced Literacy

· Reading recovery

· Accelerated Reader

· Guided reading

· And now a plethora of computerized programs

I read a research study a while back that described how teachers’ attitudes towards change projects changed over time:

· With the first change initiative, new teachers are gung-ho, leading the way

· With the second change initiative, teachers willingly engage

· With the third change, they are beginning to detect a pattern and may begin to hesitate

· And with the fourth and subsequent change, many teachers will close their doors and ignore it

Obviously, I have made some generalizations here and individual experiences will vary widely, but the existence of change, trauma, and change is critical in not only understanding, but appreciating veteran teachers:

· They are right to not embrace big change initiatives, because those initiatives will go away

· They are right to be wary of you, they have been hurt by people like you before, and by “people like you” I mean administrators.

· They are right to view you as just another cog in the machine, because you’ll be gone in a few years and they will still be here

· They are right to resist your attempts to “sell the vision” because, you’ll be gone in a few years and they will still be here

What I hope I’ve tried to do here is to reshape how you perceive experienced teachers. I want to shatter the myth of the curmudgeon. Veteran teachers are survivors, they have seen unprecedented changes, and have more experiences with school leaders than you do. They are caring and passionate, and a wealth of knowledge, and if they are hesitant to engage, they are only being wise.

This closes Act I.

I promised you a simple framework for working with experienced teachers in Act II, but I first need to thank the educators who inspired this framework. Last week I DM’d about 30 education connections on LinkedIn, asking for their tips on working with veteran teachers. I received 13 replies, which was surprising. Clearly, this is something we need to talk about more.

My responders consisted of people I’ve know for a long time and others I had just recently connected with. They are district leaders, principals, assistant principals, and veteran teachers. They come from rural, urban and suburban schools, and are diverse in a myriad of other ways. I which I could share each of their quotes, but this is already a longer episode than I had planned.

Please, fellow educators and esteemed colleagues, accept my deepest gratitude:

· Jessica Preisig

· Dr. Darian Byrd

· Alex Auriemma

· Bryan Lively

· Dr. Efrain Martinez

· Nicole Ward

· Kristin Holt

· Dr. Cliff Lee

· Natacha Isaac-Bonaventure

· AJ Bianco

· Jennifer Bertram

· Dr. Sam Sircey

· Tashika Truesdale

· And Dr. Bart Elliott

You have made this episode into, I hope, something special.

This model is not meant to be exhaustive, it is meant to be simple and, above all, actionable. I’ve developed it from the perspective of beginning with nothing and working through a four-stage process of developing a collegial relationship with your experienced teachers. Remember the collegial relationship consists of both personal and professional components, see episode 154 from this past Friday if you need a refresher.

The framework should be especially valuable for new administrors and new-ish administrators in new buildings. There is nothing earth shattering here and the value is not in the behaviors – you are probably engaging in many of them already. The value is in putting the behaviors together into a process.

Without further ado…

Phase 1: Learn

Phase 2: Empower

Phase 3: Support

Phase 4: Grow

Let’s dig deeper…

Learn: Learn about the person. Learn about all the changes they’ve seen, the ups, downs, joys, sorrows, the traumas. Learn about their teaching super power, their aspirations. Learn what they bring to their school. How do we do this?

· Be present. As Alex Auriemma said, “One thing I learned this year is really to lean in. People want to feel safe, and heard. And by leaning into the experience of a veteran teacher, especially as a new, young AP, you’re able to build trust and rapport.” And Bryan Lively said “. I think being present, is one of the biggest things. So many of my veteran teachers have thanked me for listening to them, their thoughts, ideas, and feelings. A lot of veterans feel that they are not heard. I feel like truly listening to them first allows me to build trust”

· Ask: Ask the first question (How are you?), ask the second question (Really, how are you?) ask the third question (why?). Ask questions and seek to learn from them. Harvest their wisdom. As Jessica Preisig said, “Build relationships by seeking the voice of experience in the building.”

· Empathize: Refrain from judgement. Accept their lived experiences are different than yours, and you can’t truly understand what they have been through – the good, the bad, and the ugly. But respect their stories. As AJ Bianco said, “remember how you felt when you were in a classroom setting”

Jennifer Bertram summarized it this way: “Giving audience to the veteran voices validates their experience and can make them feel valued in a profession that doesn't offer that very often.”

Learning about veteran teachers, especially being present and listening, were the most mentioned comments by far, so if you take away nothing else from this episode, at least learn, by being present, asking, and empathizing.

Once we’ve learned both about and from our experienced teachers, we are in a position to empower them, to improve our school by leaning on its most experienced members. Phase 2 is to Empower. There are three parts to this:

· Autonomy: Give as much latitude as possible to your veteran teachers. Avoid burdening them with unnecessary requirements. Don’t tell them how to teach. As Cliff Lee recognized, “Nothing delegitimizes a person's authority like forcing meaningless work on people”

· Leverage their expertise: What is their teaching super-power? What are the skills and techniques they have mastered over the years? Maybe instead of bringing in someone like me to teach about developing classroom procedures, tap the talent in the room and have your veteran teachers do it.

· Provide opportunities: Specifically, provide leadership opportunities. Mentoring, leading parts of your MTSS process, or important committees. Involve them in scheduling and updating policies and procedures.

Okay, we’ve learned about our veterans, we’ve empowered them, now let’s support them. In my frameworks, supporting teachers means something very specific. Supporting teachers means bringing alignment to your school, so that teachers’ work, growing students, is helped, not hindered by the other dimensions of the organization. Specifically:

· Align: Your resources, so that teachers’ time and attention – the tow most valuable resources – are focused on teaching. Align your structures so that teachers feel like they are swimming downstream, not upstream. And focus on the school’s affirming purpose of growing students and cultivating adults who have agency in their lives. Its about lives, not scores.

· Protect: From the ravages and vagaries of external forces. Full confession, in a time when teachers are being targeted as a profession and as individuals by a plethora of media and politically motivated groups, I’m not sure how to best do this. It seems like having a teacher’s back isn’t enough when people are attacking them head on. I guess, that’s another episode, which I will need lots of help with, but at the least be a wall between angry voices and rhetoric and constantly remind your teachers of how positive and powerful they are.

· Celebrate: In a hundred different ways. Yes to food and sticky notes, yes to jeans or whatever tokens you can offer, but let’s also begin every meeting with celebrations, let’s find small wins every day, in every lesson, and let’s relentlessly point them out to everyone. And let’s acknowledge and admire the landmarks of long service.

Now that we have done all of this – we have learned about and from our veteran teachers, we have empowered and supported them, now we can help support their growth. How do we grow veteran teachers? We don’t. We help them grow themselves. Consider the incredible words shared with me by Efrain Martinez, an elementary school principal and producer of the Wisdom and Productivity podcast,

Never forget that as the coach, your presence upon the field does not signify the act of scoring a goal. The tutelage of Messi or Ronaldo in the art of goal-scoring remains beyond your purview. The seasoned veteran embodies expertise, while you grace the periphery. Employing an empathetic and Socratic demeanor, you possess the capacity to gently probe the facets you've perceived, affording the veteran the privilege of self-discovery. As a keen observer from the sidelines, you are endowed with the insight to illuminate those hidden blind spots, offering your revelations in a manner untouched by judgment. Through this harmonious interplay, the veteran finds themselves enveloped in admiration, for you have inadvertently nurtured their journey towards the pinnacle of their potential.

It's hard to build on this imagery, so I’m not going to try. Just embrace your role in growing your experienced teachers as that of holding up the mirror. Be present, ask the questions that pave the path for self-reflection, and provide assistance when they ask.

Summarizing (The big takeaway)

This has been one of the most time-consuming episodes I’ve done, and honestly I feel like we are just scratching the surface. Mara and I are trying to get a nice visual of the process put together but I don’t know if it will be ready when this episode releases at 6 AM on August 29th. I’ll post it on the podcast page of my website at https://www.frederickbuskey.com/appodcast.html . I’ll announce on the daily email when it’s done, so if you aren’t a subscriber this might be a good time to sign up. There will be a pop-up on the website to make it easy.

Again, if you take nothing else away from this episode, be present, listen, ask, and empathize. If you can do these things, you are halfway there.

Show Outro

I think this is a special episode of the show. It might be the best solo episodes I’ve recorded. If you think this has been a great episode, worthy of the days I have put into it, PLEASE do one or all the following:

· Forward the podcast link to your colleagues and encourage them to listen

· Email me at frederick@frederickbuskey.com or DM me on LinkedIn and tell me something, a story, a suggestion, or some praise.

· Rate and review the podcast! Rating and reviews are two of the metrics I track and a bump in those will be evidence that this episode hit home.

This could be the greatest episode ever, but I will never know if some of the 3-400 people who listen to this show don’t forward it, review it, reach out to me, so please do one of those things. It’s a way of giving back – or giving forward.

Speaking of forward, I look forward to seeing you again on Friday when we recap this week’s daily emails.

I’m Frederick Buskey and thank you again for joining me on this episode of the Assistant Principal Podcast. Remember to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode. Cheers!

Frederick’s Links:

Email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com

Website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/strategicleadershipconsulting

Daily Email subscribe: https://adept-experimenter-3588.ck.page/ff61713840

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Hello Colleagues and welcome to another 5 for Friday episode of The Assistant Principal Podcast!

Today’s shout out goes to…William D Parker, host of the Principal Matters Podcast and a kind, gentle, and caring human being who is quickly becoming a good friend. Will released his interview of me back on August 9. My biggest fan – my wife Pam – said it is the best I have done in an interview and Wil made it easy. That’s episode 356 of The Principal Matters Podcast.

Will was also kind enough to leave a glowing review on Apple podcasts, so thank you Will!

Takeaway

Relationships exist in two basic spheres
When we understand how, in an individual’s life, their work and home lives influence each other, we can be confident that we have a collegial relationship
The collegial relationship helps us to serve the person because:

a. We know what they want

b. We have insight into how to help them get there

c. We can coach them , which is one of the best ways to help people grow.

That is this week’s Five for Friday rendition of The Assistant Principal Podcast.

Thank you for including me on your leadership journey.

I’m Frederick Buskey and thank you again for joining me on this episode of the Assistant Principal Podcast. Cheers!

Frederick’s Links:

Email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com

Website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/strategicleadershipconsulting

Daily Email subscribe: https://adept-experimenter-3588.ck.page/ff61713840

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I was a coach before I was a teacher. Literally, I volunteered as a football coach right after I graduated from high school. I played three years of high school and four years of college football, and I had position coaches, defensive coordinators, and head coaches all involved in my development as a player. Some of my coaches were good, some weren’t, but I was reliant on them in a way which is hard to explain. Today’s episode is about growing veteran teachers, but we are going to invest most of our time and attention into examining the coaching relationship rather than the technical aspects of coaching. Why? Why talk about the relationship instead of the actual nuts and bolts of working with veteran teachers? I think you already know the answer…

Celebrations: New beginnings upon new beginnings

Let me begin by clarifying some terms and connecting some dots:

· Your two primary responsibilities:

o Keeping people safe

o Support and grow your teachers

· Support and growth

· The flywheel (e.g. coaching cycle)

· The conundrum: how do we choose the first PD? This is the essential question, especially for veteran teachers.

· Back to coaching:

o As an athlete,

§ I was dependent on my coaches

§ I assumed they knew more than I did

§ I was highly motivated to get better

§ The power differential was huge

o As a teacher

§ The dependency was different

§ I was not convinced my principal knew more than I did

· Especially in PE

· Perception v. reality

· What I wanted my classroom to be like

§ I was still highly motivated to get better, but…

· I was not as dependent on my principal as I was on my coach

· Asking my coach for extra reps was a plus, asking my admin for extra attention could be perceived as a negative

§ The power differential was not as big – I could keep playing without his approval

My own story:

· My progression as a teacher (PE, SPED, SS => NBCT)

o Unique challenges

o I was reflective

o I had blind spots

· The “official” rubric and the process

· My two real struggles

o Boys

o SPED

Lessons from my own experience:

· When we are competent, we can lose sight of how complex our craft is

· We may or may not recognize our own pain points

· We know what we want, even if what we want may not be the most important thing

· In all likelihood, there are many elements of our teaching that we know better than someone who is trying to help us

How do we grow veteran teachers?

· Put them in the lead

· Help them clarify their desires, needs, and goals

o Example: Spending way to much time prepping lessons and taking care of a sick parent

· Help them define what success looks like

o Example: Still have good lessons, but am able to focus on my mom instead of thinking about school

· Help them identify resources and map a plan (e.g. Teaching Middle School ELA and EB academics)

· Be the accountability partner, help gather the data, and then hold up the mirror that helps them to assess how they’ve done and what comes next

· In short – become a servant

A couple cautionary thoughts:

· Trauma

· Growth is a process, not an event. A single “I wonder” statement is not helpful if it isn’t a part of a larger process.

· Focus on entering the process based on your capacity. It is better to engage in the process with fidelity with three people and ignore the rest than to do one-offs or be haphazard with 20. Know your capacity and choose appropriately. (see episode 8 Who Should I coach?) – link in show notes.

· To care is to help people grow in the direction they want to grow, and to grow veteran teachers, you need to care.

· You don’t know as much as you think you do. We all have biases and gaps which make our ability to determine the “one best thing” a teacher needs to work on an impossible task.

The Big Idea

Hold up the mirror for the veteran teacher. Get to know them, to understand them – their aspirations, triumphs, burdens, and fears. Help them clarify their own needs – the things that will allow them to gain more joy from teaching. Help them develop a plan for growth. Help them collect and analyze the data around their implementation of new strategies. Hold up the mirror, with caring and a servant’s heart. And if you can’t do that, don’t try and grow your veteran teachers.

Show Outro

So how do we put this into action? I encourage you to:

· Check in with your veteran teachers this week and ask them three questions:

o What is your teaching super-power?

o What’s the biggest difference between who you are now as a teacher, and who you were when you began?

o If you could get students to do one thing differently, what would it be?

· Don’t respond to the answers, just listen and think.

· Do this for a week, and next Tuesday I’ll offer some additional steps to build on what you find out.

I look forward to seeing you again on Friday when we recap this week’s daily emails, which were all about the same theme underlying today’s episode – relationships! It was a fun week of emails, so I hope you will tune in.

Thank you for including me on your leadership journey. If you’d like to walk more with me, I have a couple simple ways to do so:

Invest no money but a little time and download our free checklist on building your support network. That checklist is hanging around for three more days and then it is gone. If you don’t have a great support network, begin building a better one today by getting the checklist. Each day you’ll also receive some detailed advice about developing your network. If you go to my website at fb.com, you’ll be met with a pop-up window – plug in your email and you’ll get a link to the checklist.
You can also choose to become a supporting member of our community by contributing $9 a month. You’ll get early and unfettered access to our free courses, a discussion area, a library of past content, and the occasional webinar. You will also be helping me to continue investing both time and money in producing this podcast, writing the daily email, and producing free content.
Finally, you can become a full member of our APEx community and join me for monthly group coaching and lots of other perks.

You can get the details and links for all of these on my website at fb.com

Please remember to subscribe and rate this podcast. Rating the show helps others find it, and if you want to be a superfan, consider leaving a review. We are at 17 ratings and four reviews. This is a good start, but increasing those numbers makes it much easier for other assistant principals to find the show.

I’m Frederick Buskey and thank you again for joining me on this episode of the Assistant Principal Podcast. Cheers!

Episode 8, Who Should I Coach?: https://theassistantprincipal.transistor.fm/8

Frederick’s Links:

Email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com

Website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/strategicleadershipconsulting

Daily Email subscribe: https://adept-experimenter-3588.ck.page/ff61713840

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Hello Colleagues and welcome to another 5 for Friday episode of The Assistant Principal Podcast!

Today’s shout out goes to… I don’t know. It’s been a quiet week at the podcast as everyone gears up for school. Please consider emailing me, DMing me on LinkedIn, or leaving a review of the podcast on Apple podcasts – so I can give someone a shout out – so I can give you a shout out!

Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of August 14-18, 2023.

New plus new = good!

New teachers want close relationships with their administrators.

In the end, we stay in organizations because of the relationships we have with leaders.

Takeaway

Friday’s email summarized it all. If your school culture isn’t where you want it to be, there are two critical things to look at:

· First is the quality of the relationships you have with others. If those aren’t where you want them to be, go back to Friday’s email, print it off, and cut out the list of bullet points. Tape them to your computer, your door, mirror, everywhere. Just begin asking questions that help you learn about people.

· Second, and this will be an upcoming episode, look at the alignment within your organization. The easiest thig to check is the demand you are putting on people’s static resources:

o Resources come in two forms

o Time and attention are different (giving time to something when you are fried)

o Backpack size

o Lightening the load can improve culture

That is this week’s Five for Friday rendition of The Assistant Principal Podcast.

Thank you for including me on your leadership journey.

Thank you for including me on your leadership journey. If you’d like to walk more with me, I have a couple simple ways to do so:

Invest no money but a little time and download our free checklist on building your support network.
Invest $9 a month and about 20 minutes of your time to become a supporting member of our community. You’ll get early and unfettered access to our free courses, a discussion area, a library of past content, and the occasional webinar. You will also be helping me to continue investing both time and money in producing this podcast, writing the daily email, and producing free content.
Finally, you can become a full member of our APEx community and join me for monthly group coaching and lots of other perks.

You can get the details and links for all of these on my website at fb.com

I look forward to seeing you again next Tuesday when we play with some ideas about how to support veteran teachers.

I’m Frederick Buskey and thank you again for joining me on this episode of the Assistant Principal Podcast. Cheers!

Frederick’s Links:

Email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com

Website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/strategicleadershipconsulting

Daily Email subscribe: https://adept-experimenter-3588.ck.page/ff61713840

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Today’s episode is packed full of amazing information, ideas, and inspiration. We are going to conclude today’s show with a simple technique for putting everything in the show into practice. It is simple, and you can become competent in the technique with almost no practice, and it will take you less than five minutes a day. The result will be profound. Please, walk with me through this episode and you can step out the other side refreshed, renewed, and ready.

Notable Quotes

Angela Maiers:

“Every person has a sign on them saying, “do I matter to you?” This is not a hollow question… this is encoded in our DNA.”
“The drive to matter affects everything from the moment we were born.”

“We don’t have to guess anymore, these practices make the biggest difference with people.”

“Mattering is the sense that you have significant to others… We need others around us to know we matter.”

“We asked 500,000 thousand kids one question: what would make you run to school on your worst day? The results came back – they wanted to know someone was excited about their existence.”

“Three behaviors: Noticing, naming, and meaning”

“Your presence is what it takes to make a mattering moment, 2-20 seconds.”

“When you go through the world feeling invisible, it changes your state.”

“Connection before content.”

“How you greet people and how you leave people are the two most important parts”

2-5-2 (2-20 seconds, how you greet and how you leave):

· 2: Pause, smile, look at them, (quadruple bonus points for slipping in their name)

· 5: Five people a day to acknowledge

· 2: Wow moments: 2 seconds to share something that made you smile

“Every single day I pick 3-5 people and I share something I noticed about them.”

Frederick:

“The purpose gets distorted… people matter and we need to start there,”

“Asking the second question, ‘no, really, how are you’ signals to you that I care.”

Angela Maiers Links:

Email: angelamaiers@gmail.com

Website: https://angelamaiers.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelamaiers/

Free Resources: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u205KzVYNdkYnLrtqD-GrvUV7-mTyQQr/view

Frederick’s Links:

Email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com

Website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/strategicleadershipconsulting

Daily Email subscribe: https://adept-experimenter-3588.ck.page/ff61713840

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Hello Colleagues and welcome to another 5 for Friday episode of The Assistant Principal Podcast!

So much to celebrate today:

· WOW! This is number 150 of The Assistant Principal Podcast!

· We topped 4500 downloads in July – a new record!

· I keep hearing from listeners telling me how the podcast has helped them land their first AP job, or work with a teacher, and more.

Today’s shout out goes to… You my colleague. All of you, and most especially,

· The 16 of you who have invested a minute in rating the podcast!

· The numerous people who have emailed me or DMd me on LinkedIn to share how the show has helped them. I hope you understand how powerful that is, and how much it motivates me to get better. Honestly, talking into the void taps my courage every episode, but having feedback helps me remember that I’m not speaking into the void, that people are listening, and that this show matters.

· The people who forward this show and recommend it to their colleagues. Very few listeners found this show in social media. Most of you either joined via my email list or heard about the show from someone else. Thank you for being a part of growing this show.

Frederick’s Links:

Email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com

Website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/strategicleadershipconsulting

Daily Email subscribe: https://adept-experimenter-3588.ck.page/ff61713840

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Congratulations! You finally have that brand new AP job! Or maybe you’re walking into a
different new leadership position, or moving into a different school. Or maybe you aren’t going
anywhere... yet.
Today my special guest and I are going to dig into the four essentials that many of the support
programs for school leaders miss. These are four essentials to help you take care of you so you
can stay play the long game. Leadership isn’t a sprint. I’m not sure it’s a marathon wither –
maybe more like my recent Pennine Way through hike of 270 miles, but... longer. The thing is,
you can’t stay in the game if you’re injured – whether that’s physically, emotionally, or
spiritually. Today’s podcast will help prevent those injuries and keep you in top form so you can
continue supporting and growing others for years to come.

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Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of July 31-August 4, 2023.

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Passion!
Remember when you were just starting out and you wanted to set the world on fire? I know, you
are in school leadership, so you are still setting the world on fire – in a good way – but maybe
some days it feels like your box of matches is running a bit low. Maybe? Today we have a very
special guest who is on the front end of her career, with matches to spare. Her passion and
wisdom are contagious, and whether you have an abundance or dearth of matches, or are
somewhere in between, today’s guest will bring a smile to your face and a spark to your heart.

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Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of July 24-28, 2023.

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You can’t do it alone! Building a support network is essential to any leader’s success but is critical to first-year assistant principals. A good network consists of four roles which we will explore today.

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Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of July 17-21, 2023.

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Accountability is compassionate. Conflict builds trust. Switches influence our mindset. At first glance, none of these statement may seem to make a lot of sense, but 30 minutes from now you will probably be embracing the ideas behind them – ideas that lead us to powerful truths which will improve life and leadership. Today, we dig into compassionate accountability with a very special guest.

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Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of July 10-14, 2023.

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What if I could give you three strategies to magically prevent burnout? Do I have your attention?
Full disclosure – I don’t have three strategies, because burnout isn’t about you. It’s about
something bigger. And you can’t prevent burnout. It requires something greater. Sounds a bit
confusing? Playfulness aside, today we are looking at something essential to everyone listening.
We are going to talk about burnout, but I promise you this will be a unique conversation and
something different from the “walk away from work and get your exercise” that is typical of
burnout conversations. Yes, we will encourage you to get exercise, but today is more about
reframing than rejuvenating.

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Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of July 3-7, 2023.

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One of my favorite books is Jim Collins’ Good to Great – a book about what separates great companies from good ones. Collins’ book focuses on organizations, so what about leaders? What separates a great assistant principal from a good one? If you aren’t at the level of leadership you’d like to be, how do you get to being awesome? Today’s guest will help us take a few important steps on that journey down the road to awesome!

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Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of June 26-30, 2023.

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We are in an era where teacher and school lead autonomy is under a lot of pressure. It is becoming common practice, especially at the elementary level, for teachers to be handed a tightly structured curriculum and scripted teaching package and told “do this.” We even hear the term “teacher-proof” being used to refer to the idea that anyone, even a struggling teacher, can do this program.

On the other end, we have mandatory evaluation processes that, while well-intentioned, concentrate time and attention on a summative process that actually detracts from the formative work that helps teachers to grow in their craft.

Both of these situations put processes and purpose before people, so today Mike Anderson and I are going to help you think about how to be more strategic and to leverage these two phenomena to put people first and to help grow a better school.

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Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of June 19-23, 2023.

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In behavioral psychology, a punishment is defined as any change that reduces the likelihood of a
behavior occurring again. Retribution is defined as legal revenge, with something being taken or
inflicted upon someone else for a wrong.
Let’s be honest, we mix these terms up a lot. Students can only act in the ways that they have
learned, and only cope using the strategies they have.
What if there was another way to “do discipline”? One that didn’t chew up half your day and
that actually did decrease the likelihood that you would be dealing with the same kid and same
issue over and over? If your curiosity is piqued, stay tuned!

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Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of June 12-6, 2023.

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One of the most common laments I hear from school leaders involves the lack of student engagement present in so many classrooms. What drives engagement isn’t activities, its learning – deeper learning. But what is deeper learning, and how do we help teachers learn about it and implement it? I hope you are ready as we go deep into deeper learning on today’s episode.

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Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of June 4-9, 2023.

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Assistant Principal Exceleration Show Notes, Episode 79: Just be visible About this show: “Can Every School Succeed?” That’s a big question and I’m not sure about the answer. I do know that every school can get better. Is that enough? Again, I don’t know. But I do know someone who does and he is our guest on the show today! Notable Quotes David: You know, great teachers, equal happy teachers. I've worked with some teachers that were struggling to find their place. And they had bogged down in a lot of negativity. And when we were able to break through that, kind of see the forest through the trees a little bit, you just saw everything change within their instruction and you just saw everything in their classroom change. But I want everyone to learn from my successes and also my mistakes. As well because again, I made every mistake in the book multiple times. thinking about positive school cultures, you have to be in a position where it's OK to fail in front of everybody. Because if you can't do that, like there there's a culture issue. But I I went back many times to my different stakeholders. Say I got that wrong. This is what happened. And but we were OK because my heart was in the right place. I was trying to better something and we took the wrong path. But hey, let's course correct. And then the next time we did it. You know I'd be so much of a better parent if my kid came with a manual but they didn't. And so being able to kind of work through that and have that culture transparency but also be able to to to not just. Talk the talk, but walk the walk. Be able to get into classrooms. Be able to be an instructional leader. https://www.frederickbuskey.com/apex-members-page.html Assistant Principal Exceleration I used to block it on my calendar. It's a classroom observations and I told my office staff do not book any appointments during those times and it would be like a two hour chunk every day. And the other thing I said was because, you know, administrators care around radios. Well, walkie-talkie I said. I'm going to turn off my radio when I'm on my classroom observations. If there is an emergency like the school is on fire, or I have a or there's a serious injury or like a true emergency, text me. The first year I did this, I had some parents who I found out were a little upset with me because I came down to the school and you know, I was told he wasn't available. I had to work through that, but then they learned. Call ahead and don't just show up, call ahead. And that time is sacred to me. My staff knew that too, so we worked around it. So again, we were educating parents at the same time and and I wanted them to know, hey, being in classrooms is something super important for me. And I want the best education for your kids and for me to ensure that for me to provide feedback and to be there for my teachers, I need to be in classrooms. And my office staff, they they took some hits too. I would buy them coffee every time that happened and we worked through it. the other tangible thing to do once you're in the classroom is you leave, a positive posted. Behind I don't care if it was the worst classroom observation you've ever done. Like you find the one thing. You have some nice work in the classroom, work on the walls, bang, post a note on. You know, you never leave something negative, always positive. And that again helps to bring that fear down from teachers who are not used to you doing this. And they're going to be scared about that posting of the first time. Like what did he put on there? Like what did I do wrong? Oh, he liked, you know, the discussion I was leading. Teachers then talk about that in the lunchroom and that spreads. That's that positive culture that you want to spread. We want to be clinical, not critical. But as far as culture goes, get out there, you know, get out of your office. https://www.frederickbuskey.com/apex-members-page.html Assistant Principal Exceleration When you walk on a school campus, you can feel the culture. You can sense it from the moment you step on campus. No one has to say anything to you. You can just feel it. And I always look around and people are happy. Are they smiling there, greeting each other, saying hello. I would say keeping up with the current instructional practices that keep changing our world keeps changing because kids keep changing. And so when I'm recommending a strategy, I want to make sure that the research states that these are the best strategies. be present, be visible, you know, be out there. You do not want to be the Invisible assistant principal. Being an administrator can be a very, very lonely job because there are things you cannot talk to the general staff with confidential and different things. So have that support system and that's again. Going back to the principal's desk Facebook group, I have folks post in there anonymously all the time, and then all of a sudden, you know, I check it like an hour later, 50 responses on how to deal with the situation or just words of encouragement and people will message me all the time and say it's just what I needed. Frederick: I don't know if I have any original thoughts. I just steal from the smartest, best people I can find. When you're successful, you don't reflect on it and learn from it, but when you fail. One of the things I really want to draw attention to, and what you were talking about was that that by blocking the classroom observation period. That's not a time management strategy, that's a priority management strategy and and that's that's one of the keys for moving from that zone of urgent leadership to being able to be strategic leadership is that we stop focusing on time and we start focusing on priorities. https://www.frederickbuskey.com/apex-members-page.html Assistant Principal Exceleration I think we, we have a problem with the language around observation. Because if I say I'm doing an observation, why don't even know what that means beyond you being in my room. I don't know what that means and I don't know what to expect. And so I really push this idea of different kinds for patterns of observation, but one of them being performative. So performative observation, I'm going to your performance for my enjoyment. For me to learn, not to help me become a better teacher. And so if teachers know if we can use that language, we're out doing performative observations. They know it's not about them, it's about us just trying to to learn and understand better what's happening in school. Links: Davids Website Davids Book My email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com The Assistant Principal Podcast website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/appodcast.html Sign up for the daily leadership email: https://mailchi.mp/c15c68e6df32/specialedition Website: www.frederickbuskey.com Blog: www.frederickbuskey.com/blog (reposts of the daily email) https://www.frederickbuskey.com/apex-members-page.html

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Imagine setting a leadership intention at the beginning of each day. That’s what many readers of the daily email do. For some, it has become a ritual: Pour a cup of coffee, open your email, read the Strategic Leader Daily, and set one intention to be aware of or execute for the day. The daily email is a powerful leadership practice so if you aren’t already a subscriber, I hope you’ll consider joining the list. It’s just one more way to include me on your leadership journey, and that would bring me joy. You can find a link on my homepage at https://www.frederickbuskey.com/

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Assistant Principal Podcast Content Episode Outline

Show title and release date: November 22, 2022

Show Description:

Last episode we looked at the flywheel through the lens of normative, or group, professional development. Remember, the flywheel refers to a set of practices that, when executed over and over again, build positive momentum that improves the organization and leads to fulfillment of the purpose. In a school, this translates to supporting teacher growth by providing professional development, following up with targeted observations that gather data about the implementation of the practices from the PD, and then using the data to drive the next PD session. Today we will look at how the flywheel changes when we focus on a specific teacher’s growth as opposed to developing a group of teachers.

Show Intro

Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast. I’m your host Frederick Buskey. The goal of this podcast is to help improve the life and leadership of assistant principals. This is a content-focused episode. The content will stand on its own, but we will take a deeper dive into the topic in an upcoming issue of Quadrant2. Members of our APEx Community can expect to get support on implementing the ideas we are looking at and adapting them to their unique contexts. You can learn more about APEx and Quadrant2 at frederickbuskey.com/theassistantprincipal.

Celebrations:

Last week’s facilitation

The Big Idea

In last week’s flywheel example we supported a group of ECTs in implementing a beginning of class procedure. We taught the teachers the components of a good procedure and how to teach and reinforce it with their students. We collected normative data on:

3 steps of the procedure
Number and quality of reinforcement statements
Type of prompts used to redirect students
Notes about the writing prompt

We aggregated that data noticed that the writing prompts were a weak spot. In talking with the teachers we learned there was a lack of clarity on what a good prompt looked like and how to write it, so that would be the next round of PD. This was all a normative process – for a group.

But what about the flywheel used for an individual teacher?

Example of Mr. Gale, weakness in store step and reinforcement (6/118). This leads us into a formative coaching cycle.

Other things to think about:

Flywheel depends on infrastructure:
- Scheduled ILT
- Structured agenda focused on teacher development
- Tracking teacher progress and focus areas (ep 14)
  - Normative, formative
  - Consistent feedback
  - PD planning
- Scheduled observations
Skills:
- Adapting/creating targeted observation instruments
- Recording data accurately
- Leading conversations around data with teachers
Trust your teachers to use the data and lead the process
Group or individual
The vision: Everyone is growing all the time
One is better than none, a few are better than none
If you aren’t there, begin with ECTs

Reflection:

Where are you in this journey?
What’s holding you back?
How can your school get better if you don’t have a system for consistently growing your teachers?

Show Outro

That wraps up today’s content focused episode. We’ll be back next week with Dr. David Franklin who founded and oversees a wonderful FaceBook community for school leaders. I’m not a huge fan of FB, but David has provided a nice space for leaders to interact. That group is The Principal’s Desk. You’ll need to request access and if you decide to do that, please mention that you heard about the group on the podcast – that would be encouraging to both of us.

If you enjoyed today’s show, please subscribe and rate this podcast.

You can ask questions, make requests and give us feedback at frederick@frederickbuskey.com. We will be relaeasing an upcoming issue of our micro-journal, Quadrant2 focused on the Flywheel, so if you aren’t already subscribed you can go to frederickbuskey.com/quadrant2.

That wraps up today’s show! I’m Frederick Buskey and I hope you’ll join me next time for the Assistant Principal Podcast.

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2022-11-15_75_The Flywheel Part 1_FINAL audio 00:12 : Leadership really is a journey. Oftentimes, we begin that journey by being sucked into the black hole of urgency. And then we're able to start to break away from that pole of that urgent gravity by implementing some strategically reactive processes. And eventually those processes give us the time and the ability to move into that phase of strategic leadership. That's that journey is actually the topic of this week's daily emails. So if you're subscribing to our daily email, then you'll know what I'm talking about. And if you're not subscribing, I guess you can either go and subscribe, you can go to my website and check out the blog, or you can wait for five for Friday this week, in which we'll recap that. 01:05 : But why are we starting this podcast episode talking about the journey? Because this episode is going to be a deep dive into what's possible. When you get to that third stage of the journey, when you become a strategic leader. This is what's going to be possible. Hello colleagues, and welcome to the Assistant Principal podcast. I'm your host, Frederick Buskey. The goal of this podcast is to help improve life and leadership for assistant principals. And I guess the secret might be out that other school leaders can benefit from the show as well. 01:45 : This is a content focused episode and this content stands on its own, but we'll also be taking a deeper dive into this top into today's topics in an upcoming issue of Quadrant 2, our bimonthly micro journal. Also, members of our apex community can expect to get some support on implementing some of these ideas that we're looking at today and then adapting them to their own unique contexts. 02:10 : You can learn more about Apex and Quadrant 2 at frederickbuskey.com backslash the assistant principal. Remember that there are four principles of strategic leadership. Strategic leaders. Place purpose above urgency. They focused on identifying problems rather than treating symptoms. They make sure that they're making progress and not just taking action. And then finally and most most importantly is that they focus on developing people, not checking off tasks. Those first three principles of strategic leadership, purpose problems, and progress are really only important because they're the things that help us get to that fourth, principle which is developing people. 03:10 : And today's show is all about developing people. We're going to take some concepts that you've heard me talk about. And weave them together and show you what the complete package can look like. The first concept that you'll hear me talk about is the four patterns of observation, which we covered back in episode 65 We'll touch a little bit on last week's episode on Professional Development, in which I talked about the idea that teachers really should be the drivers of their own professional development. 03:47 : And we'll hit on what I think is the most important of all the concepts, which is the flywheel. And we've never really fully broken down the flywheel. We did some conversation with Doctor Melissa Burns way back in Episode 32 which aired in June. But this episode will be the first time that it really. Break down the flywheel with specific examples and walk you through that process. And this is what I'm most passionate about, so I'm really excited for this episode. Ok, so let's dive in. We'll begin with a scenario. I'm in a middle school middle school assistant principal. It's mid November and we're noticing an uptick in student referrals, specifically for students talking and not being in their seats. 04:41 : We begin to take a little bit deeper dive into the data and what we find is that the increases are happening in specific classrooms and three of these classrooms are staffed with early career teachers. In our weekly instructional leadership team meeting. Which, by the way, we broke down in episode 49 the ILT, back in August. In our instructional leadership team meeting. We decide that we need to we need to observe and see what's going on in these classrooms, so we commit to doing a series of performative observations. During transition times in the classrooms of those early career teachers. 05:28 : Now remember, performative observations are for our benefit. So we're not gathering any hard data. We're not trying to improve teaching. We just want more information. We want to find out what's happening. This is for our benefit. Thus, it's a performative observation, and we can communicate that clearly to teachers so they know that we're not going in there to judge or criticize them. So we do our performative observations and in our next regularly scheduled ILT meeting, which focuses specifically on instruction and for which we have a structured agenda, which was also part of Episode 49 the ILT. 06:13 : We have a structured agenda and as part of that agenda we talk about what we saw overall with these three teachers that are struggling with transitions. So in our discussion, the big thing that jumps out is that there's not any evidence that there's beginning class procedures in these three early career teachers classrooms. So we decided to go back and talk with those teachers as a group to let them know what we've seen and see if there's a way that we can support them. 06:49 : At the same time, our instructional coach is going to dig through their resources and look at specific procedures for transitions or excuse me, for beginning class routines and. She will pull that together so that we have a nice clean, quality set procedure for how to begin class and we have that ready to support those teachers. So we go to the teachers and. Use the data from the increase in discipline referrals. And we can just take that data and and aggregate it. So we're not focusing on any specific teacher, but we can show them how this block of three teachers has many more referrals happening, that there's been an increase and that it's more than what we're seeing in some of the other classrooms. 07:43 : We can also just have the conversation about what we've seen, but we really need to ask them how they're doing. And that conversation could go a different way because two different ways teachers could be reluctant to. Express that there's anything going wrong. Or they might say yes. The kids are driving me crazy and I don't know what to do. Which is then an easy entry point for us to be able to say, OK, well, we think we can help. Here's what we noticed. That at the beginning of class, it's taking a long time to get everybody settled in. And teachers will probably yes. They don't do what I ask them to do. It's taking too long, they're talking too much, and it's really creating a bad situation. 08:25 : Ok, we think we can help you with that. What we'd like to do is to work with you on establishing an beginning class procedure and we'll give you all the support you need to implement that and then we'll give you the follow up support to see if it works, and if it doesn't work we'll adjust course. But this should take about a week to do. I mean you guys in on that. And in tying back to last week's podcast where I talked about teachers need to drive their own professional development in most cases. So if we have decent teachers, if these teachers are, you know, have good potential, then they probably are aware that they're struggling with this and having this conversation and and sharing some of the data with them, they're probably going to want to engage in establishing these classroom procedures. 09:27 : If we have someone who is really resistant but also really struggling as a teacher and just saying no, I don't have any problems, that's a case where we just say no, I'm sorry, this is what we're going to work on. You're going to do it this way and we're going to take you through the process and then once we've got that done, then we'll talk and you can share with us how you want to grow. 09:49 : But if we've got a teacher that's resistant to growth. At that point, then, we step in and we'd be more directive, but in most cases. We can collaborate with teachers to identify what they need and. If we have a teacher, one of these early career teachers that says no, this is not my problem, I have this problem over here. Then we may need to back off of. Establishing the opening class procedure and help them in the area they want because if they want help in a different area, but we force them into what we want to do, we're now working against against them and now we're not being supportive. 10:31 : So even if opening class procedure is the most important thing that they really need to get it right, if they're convinced there's something else, we need to go figure out how to help them in that area and once we do that and. We help add some value to what they're doing, then we can go back and revisit opening class procedure. And now we've built some trust and we've built some credibility and we're going to be able to get to that. 10:57 : So when I talk about teachers driving their own professional development, this is what I mean, right? It's a negotiation. And sometimes there are few cases where we're just going to tell people, you need to take care of this. There are a lot of cases that are going to be more collaborative where we can say, hey, we've seen something, here's what. We're seeing here is what this looks like. We have some ideas that might help you. 11:20 : Let's talk about what that might look like and and how we can do that. And then in other cases, teachers say, no, I have something that's more of a priority to me that I want to work on. And then we say, OK, we're here to serve you and support your growth. You tell us what that is, we'll come up and we'll work together and we will help you get there. Sometimes we just have to leave, let go of our preconceived notions, we have to let go of what we think is the most important thing. So that's a bit of a digression about the whole conversation and the whole idea of how teachers drive their own professional development. 11:58 : Now we'll take it back to this specific case of our three early career teachers, who we've just done some performative observations. We've noticed that beginning of class procedures are really weak or completely absent. We've had that discussion with them. They've noticed the uptick in behaviors. They're frustrated with it as well. So now we're on the same page that we're gonna help them develop opening class procedures. Our instructional coach has already done a little bit of work in that and found out some good opening class procedures to work with them on. 12:32 : So the next thing then is that she's going to work with those teachers, teaching them what the opening class procedure is. Now, maybe those teachers are going to go back and teach it themselves to their classrooms. Maybe they'll ask her for help, or they'll ask me or the principal for help. It that just depends, and that's totally up to them what kind of support they want and implementation. But implementation happens. We teach it to them, they go and they implement, and now we form. 13:03 : We follow up with normative observations. Remember that normative observations are observations that follow up on group professional development. And so we're looking at what happens with the group. We're looking at fidelity of implementation to try to figure out, was our professional development successful? And if it was, where do we go next? If it wasn't, where do we go next? Those normative, that normative data is going to be aggregated, we're not going to disaggregate and show each teacher where they were within the group. We're just going to show the entire group together. Here's the aggregated data. In the ideal world backing up, we should do a normative observation before we implement the professional development in order to find out what the baseline is. 14:00 : But in this example, we didn't do that because it's the real world and we're busy. But after the professional development, we make sure that each of us principal APNIC get into each of the three teachers classrooms least one time and. As part of our preliminary work in our instructional leadership team meeting, we worked with the instructional coach to identify a very simple instrument that we can go and we can use to gather our follow-up data. And in the procedure, the three elements of the procedure are store your stuff, sit in your seat, and then begin writing based on a prompt that's posted on the board so. 14:47 : What we're doing is we're going to tally the number of students who successfully store their stuff, who successfully sit down, who successfully then begin engaging in the writing prompt. We're also going to tally the number of times that the teachers reinforce positive student behavior. We have also taught them that the best way to prompt a student back into the procedure is to ask a question and say, hey, what is the next step? The procedure where should you be in the procedure now? What are your classmates doing? So we want to reinforce with questions, so we're taking notes on that. 15:27 : And we're also going to take notes on the quality of the prompt. We could also set a timer and time how long it actually takes kids to get seated. So these are the things we're looking at store sit, right? Reinforcement comments and questions asked. We have three teachers. We have parent, GAIL and Bishop and. We do. Each of us does an observation. So we wind up with three observations for each of these teachers. And when we look at the aggregated data, this is after we've done the professional development. What we find is that. Students stored their stuff appropriately 167 out of 210 times. But we also notice in that data that parents class was almost 90, almost 100 %. 16:23 : Bishop's class was 100 %, but in Gail's class. There were only a there was only a success rate of less than 50 % of the kids actually storing their stuff in appropriate way. On time. When it comes to sitting. We had 195 out of 210 aggregated score, so one ninety five observations. We had 210 successful performances of students sitting down and it was again universal and parents class and abishov's class and better engals but still struggling. In writing. We had 132 Out of 210 performances that were successful. So 132 is really the the worst area so far. And what we found is that in parents class on the three observations, one of the observations was zero out of the 23 kids were writing, the other two was ten out of the 23 students were writing. 17:29 : Gail was a little bit better where we had 1216 and 16 out of 23 kids and then a Bishop's class we had virtually all the kids. On each of the three observations. So when we review this aggregated data with the teachers, remember, we're not breaking it out by teacher, we're just sharing. And so what's gonna pop out here within the aggregated discussion with the teachers is that one thirty two out of two ten, that's our lowest area. So the discussion there is going to be OK, what happened? Like you, we really saw a good increase in students sitting down, stories going, OK, what's happening with the writing? Let's have a conversation. 18:11 : And and we want to know what they think. Is happening with that writing. When we look at reinforcement statements, we notice that parent had 35 GAIL had six. And Bishop had 77 reinforcement statements. That's a total of 118 for all of the observations for the three teachers. We noticed that parent asked questions when needed and focused primarily on the areas of storing and sitting. We noticed that GAIL really wasn't using questioning strategies, was more often just telling people to sit down repeatedly. 18:51 : And we noticed that Bishop was really consistent with her reinforcement, but also with her questioning strategies, and always had those with a smile. And immediately after she had to question or prompt a student and they performed the action she gave in. Immediate positive reinforcement. We also noticed a couple other things. With parent, on the 1st observation occasion, there actually was no writing prompt. On the second observation there was a prompt, but the way it was written, it made it unclear for students as to what they were really supposed to do. 19:25 : And then the third time, she only gave a verbal prompt. There was nothing written. And Gail's classroom, what we noticed was that beginning of the transition, that storing period was very long and students were really off task. Eventually he got them settled down and he got them writing. And in Bishop's class, we noticed that students came in, they stored their stuff, they sat down, they got to writing. But we also noticed that the prompts weren't really related to the standards that Miss Bishop was teaching. So when we discuss this as an IT when we look at this data. 20:07 : It's going to be obvious to us that. Writing is still the weakest area, and that there's some seems to be a lack of clarity about what constitutes a good writing prompt and. Why the writing prompt is is important. Before we make any decisions about how to follow that up, we'll actually have the conversations with the teachers and we'll sit down and we'll say, look, we had one thirty two out of two ten on this, so this is our lowest area. 20:37 : We noticed that the prompts weren't always on the board. Again, we're not going to single out an individual teacher because this is this is a normative process. We noticed that prompts were always on the board and prompts weren't always. Written to focus on the standard. That's what we've seen. Talk to us about what's going on for you. And so maybe there we we come out with, there was confusion about what they were actually supposed to do. 21:02 : There was confusion about what the prompt was supposed to focus on, one of the teachers might say. I just don't really understand like why do we have this prompt and how do I structure it? How do I create a question that students are actually going to write on and so. If there's a common problem, we can follow up our professional development then on that writing, prompt with all three of the teachers and continue the normative process. And and really getting the written prompts to be high quality if. 21:37 : Did different teachers have different issues with those writing prompts? Then we may move into more of a formative process where we're working individually with those teachers, and we're going to model that or talk about that in Part 2 of this podcast. So in our discussion as an instructional leadership team, what really is going to jump out at us in addition to the positive improvement? Is the struggles that mister Gales happening? Because if we look remember, he really was struggling in the store area. 22:12 : And if we look at that aggregate data, we had about 75 % successful, a successful rate of students coming in and storing their stuff appropriately. About 75 %, but mister Galey's data was 40 %, so almost half of what the total was. And if we pulled Gail's numbers out of the aggregated data, we had a 99 % success rate compared to mister Galey's 40 % success rate. Another thing that really jumps out is the number of reinforcement statements. In total, of the three observations of the three teachers, so 9 observations, there were 118 reinforcement statements. 23:00 : Of that hundred and eighteen, six of those were mister Gales. In addition, instead of questioning students and prompting them to think about the procedure, he was just telling them what to do. And he was doing that repeatedly. So at this point. We see that mister Gale probably needs some different support than what Miss Parent and Miss Bishop need, so we're going to move from a normative process into a formative process. And that formative process is what we'll look at next week when we come back for Part 2 of this two-part series on implementing the flywheel and what that flywheel really looks like. 23:46 : So let's summarize how the flywheel worked in this normative process. We saw there was an issue, we talked to teachers, we collaboratively with the teachers, identified something to do professional development on which was the entering class procedure. We implemented the professional development. We then identified specific look force and created an instrument that would allow us to gather that data effectively. We scheduled observations. And each team member went in and observed each of the teachers to follow up with our customized instrument on the fidelity of the implementation. We then looked at that data and identified specific successes and specific areas where teachers were still struggling. 24:37 : We took that data to the teachers aggregated. Talked about what we saw, they talked about what they were experiencing and together identified the next step of the professional development. That's the flywheel professional development follow-up observation, use the data to plan the next round of professional development. That's the flywheel. This was a normative example of working with a group of early career teachers. And what we're going to do is come back next week and we're going to look at mister Gale and we're going to go through the same process, the same flywheel, but we'll do it in a formative process where we are focusing on the individual needs of 1 specific teacher. 25:21 : In other words, we're doing a coaching cycle. That wraps up today's content focused episode again. We'll be back next week for Part 2, and then on November twenty ninth we'll have Doctor David Franklin, who founded and overseas a wonderful Facebook community for school leaders. Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of Facebook, but David's provided a really nice space for leaders to be able to come in to interact with each other, ask questions, and support each other. 25:52 : That Facebook group is called the principal's desk. You need to. You need to request access, and if you do decide to go on Facebook and check out David's Facebook group, the principal's desk. You'll need to request admission and please mention that you heard about the group on this podcast, because that would be encouraging for both of us. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe and rate this podcast. You can ask questions, make requests, and give us feedback at frederick@frederickbuskey.com And if you'd like more content tailored towards the needs of assistant principals, you can head over to my website at frederickhusky.com That wraps up today's show. 26:33 : I'm Frederick Buskey, and I hope you'll join me next time for the Assistant Principal podcast cheers.

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Assistant Principal Podcast Content Episode Outline

Show title and release date:

Show Description:

"Those sessions do nothing for me" This was a quote from a teacher about some PD and it was shared by an admin seeking feedback on a social media site. More specifically, the teacher was commenting on a mandatory PD session. The situation and large amount of often conflicting advice got me to thinking. Are there a couple of core principles that should drive professional development?

Show Intro

Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast. I’m your host Frederick Buskey. The goal of this podcast is to help improve the life and leadership of assistant principals. This is a content-focused episode in which we take on the issue of professional development. Today’s content will stand on its own, but we will take a deeper dive into the topic in an upcoming issue of Quadrant2. Quadrant2 is our free bi-monthly micro-journal. Each issue focuses on one specific topic and provides the nuts and bolts for applying that idea in your school. You can find a link to subscribe to Quadrant2 at my website at frederickbuskey.com/quadrant2.

Celebrations:

As I began thinking about what celebration to share, my first though was that it has been a grueling six weeks and I’ve been sick the past 10 days. In terms of achievements, I don’t feel like there is a lot to cheer about. But I do control my own attitude and that alone is worth celebrating. If you listened to last week’s Five for Friday you heard me talk about my friend Steve and what he said about attitude: Bird quote

So that’s what I’m celebrating, the power we have to choose. And that is enough to get me out of my little puddle and celebrate something else – that we are together! It’s a privilege to be able to share with you and to have an opportunity to help you live and lead better.

The Big Idea

I’m going to talk about all PD today, and by all I mean about 90% of it. There will always (90% of the time) be exceptions, so please don’t get hung up on them. I’m using all because it flows and sounds better than most.

So here are my guiding principles for all PD for teachers:

All PD should help teachers to overcome specific challenges they are facing
Teachers should determine the focus of their own PD
All PD should provide immediate value
The role of the IC, P, and AP are to help each teacher meet that teacher’s PD goals

Before going deeper, let’s define teacher professional development: Teacher PD consists of an intentional effort to develop or increase knowledge, skills, and/or dispositions to improve student outcomes. PD comes in five basic forms:

Internal group led by a school or district employee
External group led by a consultant or other external agent
Mentoring and peer networks
Coaching and support from instructional leaders
Self-reflection and individual initiative

All of these are valid forms of professional development.

Okay, let’s break this down.

All PD should help teachers to overcome specific challenges they are facing
- Teaching is incredibly complex, and teachers will always have many things to improve on
- The three most precious resources in school are: people, time, and attention.
- When there is so much to learn and so little time and attention, why would we ever waste professional development opportunities? By waste I mean not making them applicable to a teacher’s specific situation and need.
Teachers should determine the focus of their own PD (Dr. P story)
- We aren’t good at determining what’s most important
- Teacher choice leads to teacher commitment
- Establishes the partnership relationship
- Success begets success
All PD should provide immediate value
- PD that helps a teacher experience immediate improvement in an area that is important to them is golden.
- Instant wins lead to more wins, and to engaging in more and more meaningful PD
The role of the IC, P, and AP are to help each teacher meet that teacher’s PD goals
- Essentially, we are partners in teacher growth.
- When we follow the other principles, we become trusted partners
- As trusted partners we can provide critical feedback and ask powerful questions that help teachers transform

Summarizing (The big takeaway)

The approach to PD that I have laid out has implications for how we structure our school, especially our instructional leadership team. We can’t meet the needs of individual teachers without aligning our work to that end.

This all feeds into the flywheel concept:

Provide meaningful PD to teachers
Follow up PD with targeted observations to determine fidelity of implementation
Use observation data to work with the teachers to plan the next PD steps
Do this over and over again

This is my passion; this is what I would love to help you do – set up a flywheel in your school. Yes, there are lots of barriers and challenges, but there are also simple things we can do to get started. The flywheel can be built on a small scale, step-by-step, with a minimal initial investment of time and energy.

For example, the first step is to set a specific time for a weekly instructional leadership team meeting. That is all – just set a time to meet every week as an instructional leadership team!

The second step is to adopt a structured agenda that places teacher development at the center of the meeting. If you have been a Quadrant2 subscriber since the beginning then you already have a template from Issue 1 which focused on the instructional leadership team. If you weren’t or aren’t a subscriber you can request a copy of issue 1 from me by emailing me at frederick@frederickbuskey.com

So, recapping the big idea from today:

All PD should help teachers to overcome specific challenges they are facing
Teachers should determine the focus of their own PD
All PD should provide immediate value
The role of the IC, P, and AP are to help each teacher meet that teacher’s PD goals
This is doable by incrementally building your flywheel

That wraps up today’s content focused episode.

If you enjoyed today’s show, please subscribe and rate this podcast.

That wraps up today’s show! I’m Frederick Buskey and I hope you’ll join me next time for the Assistant Principal Podcast.

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Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast. I’m your host Frederick Buskey. The goal of this podcast is to help improve the life and leadership of assistant principals. Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of October 31-Nov. 4, 2022. If you already get my daily leadership emails, then I hope you’ll find some added value here and if you don’t already subscribe you can find a link on my home page at frederickbuskey.com. Many readers like to begin their mornings by reading the email and setting a leadership intention for the day, but please don’t feel any pressure to subscribe. You are already doing more to grow yourself than many others out there, simply by listening to the podcast.

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Show Notes, Episode 71: Restorative Practices with Josh Stamper

About this show:

Change starts from within. That was the title of episode 20, in which we talked with Doctor Gabby Grant about introducing restorative practices into your school. Before taking external action, we need to take internal action and examine and reform our own attitudes and perspectives about things like discipline, punishment and justice. Today, we'll dig into what that journey might look like and where it might lead.

Notable Quotes

Josh Stamper

“Behavior is a language. We just have to decode what that behavior is saying in regards to the students needs” 11:04

“We just assume ‘you know not to do that. So don't do it again.’ That's not the case, right? So then we go back and we do that teach piece with the student now they're still getting consequences. I think that's the misconception is that restorative practices is Kumbaya, we're holding hands in a circle and then it's just going to magically go away. And that's not the case.” 23:00

“This is not going to happen in a week, this is not going to happen just in a month as you said it took. Just years of continuously building upon this to get it to a structure that we felt comfortable and it wasn't even perfect at that point” 28:20

“Classroom management is probably one of the most important things for our teachers because if you don't have a class that is behaving or paying attention, there's no way for them to gain that content” 31:30

“I think communication is, as far as a leader, is the number one priority or should be for anyone because you work with so many different people” 37:20

“The best way to get knowledge to the brain is through the heart. And I think that is the biggest thing, as far as an administrator, is I wanted to make sure that I was touching the lives of our students through. The emotional intelligence piece versus curriculum.” 38:50

Frederick

“Raising my children is not the same as raising somebody else's children and so we need this trauma informed care” 9:56

“Lay the foundation, get the procedures in place and make it as easy a lift as possible. So start your teachers out doing the easy stuff that they're going to have success with and leave the harder stuff to you and then build it” 24:30

Links:

Josh Stamper’s Website: https://joshstamper.com

Josh Stamper’s Book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/aspire-to-lead-joshua-stamper/1140037170

Josh Stamper’s Podcast: Aspire to Lead https://joshstamper.com/start/

Teach Better: https://www.teachbetter.com

My email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com

The Assistant Principal Podcast website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/appodcast.html

Website: www.frederickbuskey.com

Blog: www.frederickbuskey.com/blog (reposts of the daily email)

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Assistant Principal Podcast Five for Friday Template

Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast. I’m your host this week, Mara Buskey and if you don’t already know me, I am the Inclusion Strategist with Strategic Leadership Consulting, as well as Frederick’s daughter. The goal of this podcast is to help improve the life and leadership of assistant principals. Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of October 24th-28th, 2022. If you already get our daily leadership emails, then I hope you’ll find some added value here and if you don’t already subscribe you can find a link on our homepage at frederickbuskey.com. Many readers like to begin their mornings by reading the email and setting a leadership intention for the day, but please don’t feel any pressure to subscribe. You are already doing more to grow yourself than many others out there, simply by listening to the podcast.

So let’s recap. As you may know, Frederick (or my dad) has been with my mom in Kenya for the last two weeks so I had the opportunity to fill in for a week and write all the daily emails. I started off every email this week reminding our readers that these come from the perspective of me, a 23-year-old who is still very much working on her own leadership. I also ask them: What can you learn about empowering young people after reading this week’s messages?

Monday:

On Monday I wrote about my experience with Julia Cameron’s 12-week course, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. The MVP to this was “Five minutes can alter the direction of your day.” The book really changed the ways in which I talk to myself and helped engrain some positive habits. One of those habits is morning pages.

Essentially, before doing anything else after waking up (except making coffee of course) you write three pages. You can write whatever you want, but the idea is to get all of your thoughts and worries out of your head so you can be less disrupted by them later.

I challenged our readers for the remainder of the week to try writing morning pages. If 3 pages sounds scary, set your timer for five minutes. Write what you are feeling, what you’re dreading, or maybe what you need to do that day. Get out all your worries or thoughts that take up your space and energy.

And after you do it, ask yourself if you feel any different? Is your mind quieter? Is your jaw less clenched or your breathing a little deeper?

Though I know writing down your stressors or spiraling thoughts first thing in the morning won’t make them disappear, spending any amount of time with them means they exist somewhere other than inside your mind. Maybe they are a little less powerful now.

Tuesday

Tuesday was all about saying “yes” to what’s right inside you. Have you ever recognized how you were feeling and intellectualized it or explained away the emotions? Have you ever said to yourself, “I shouldn’t feel this way because …”?

When we dismiss our feelings, we invalidate ourselves. We lie to ourselves and we send the message that our emotions aren’t important.

Rather than dismissing or making excuses, just say “yes.” Say yes to the anger, the sadness, the overwhelm, guilt and grief, to fatigue, to resentment… Say yes to joy, to love, to gratitude and pride. Say yes to not wanting to feel it. Say yes to feeling uncomfortable.

Acceptance is harder than we give credit for. Accepting your feelings is accepting yourself. Accepting yourself leads to a better and truer you. And a better you means you can support and lead your people with empathy and honesty.

Wednesday

Okay, to slightly lighten things up, Wednesday I wrote about a joke I initially made. I was having a hard time and I said to my partner, “nothing’s wrong but it sure ain’t right.” I laughed and then sat for a second and realized how true that statement felt.

Startup company:

Great vision that could make real change in our communities… but it just doesn’t feel right.
Gave myself 6 months
So what do I do? I’m trusting myself. I’m diving inward, reflecting on what I’m feeling, and trusting those emotions and feelings.
When you notice something is off, do you ignore it or trust your intuition?

Thursday I talk about the stories we tell ourselves. Oftentimes, the stories are how we think things “should be.”

For example: The last few months I’ve been talking quite negatively to myself because I didn’t go to grad school right away. My thought process is that Because I haven't gone to graduate school yet, I’m lazy. Laziness is wrong. I’m wrong.

The truth is, going to grad school doesn't dictate if I’m wrong, lazy, or ultimately worthy.

But the other truth to this is if I didn’t address these stories or take time to notice they are even there, how will I know they aren’t true?

What are the stories you tell yourself? Do they actually help you? Just because you think or feel something doesn't mean it’s true.

Friday I discussed my desire for 6 months now to bake a cake after moving to Greensboro, NC in May. But until last week, I still had yet to bake anything.

Long story short, I was telling myself there wasn’t enough time, and that baking a cake wasn’t as important as all the other things on my to do list. When I dug a little deeper, I realized that it wasn’t necessarily the baking that I was so caught up on, it was what it represented: time, balance, abundance, success.

I decided enough was enough. I was going to bake something. I made some pumpkin spice muffins and I shared them with my friends. It made me so happy that I did it again the next day. I realized it really didn't take that much time and it brought me so much joy. It turned my week around.

This weekend, I urge you to forget the to-do list for just a moment. Think about something small that you’ve been wanting to do but convinced yourself there is not enough time. Go do it.

Takeaway

I think the big takeaway to all of these is to listen to yourself and trust yourself. There is so much happening in the world, and I think my generation, or at least a lot of the young people I talk to, are questioning the world, themselves, and our priorities. We aren’t finding value and purpose in living that “American dream” that we have been fed our whole lives. I think we’ve also realized over the last few years that if we aren’t taking care of ourselves, we can’t take care of others. I don’t know. Maybe all generations have thought this way. Let me know how you feel, you can find my email in the show notes.

This wraps up this week’s Five for Friday rendition of The Assistant Principal Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s show, please subscribe and rate this podcast. Rating the podcast really does help other people to find it.

I’m always trying to improve the show, so if you have feedback please email me at frederick@frederickbuskey.com. If you’d like to find out more about what we’re doing to support assistant principals, you can head over to the website at frederickbuskey.com/theassistantprincipal.

I’m Mara Buskey, thanks for trusting me to lead you through some of my thoughts this week, and I hope you’ll join us next time for the Assistant Principal Podcast.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mara-buskey-98321218b/

Email: mara@frederickbuskey.com

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Assistant Principal Podcast Content Episode Outline

Show title and release date: October 25, 2022

Show Description:

Every teacher should have a procedure for beginning class. Most opening class procedures share some common elements:· What to do with materials· How or when to sit down· Getting started on bell work or an activator I’ve been teaching procedures for about twenty years, but this summer I made one small tweak in my format that promises to pay big dividends.

Show Intro

Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast. I’m your host Frederick Buskey. The goal of this podcast is to help improve the life and leadership of assistant principals.

Today’s episode focuses on the importance of identifying clear goals for our procedures, but before we go any further, I want to remind you about our free micro-journal, Quadrant2. Issues of Quadrant2 come out once every 3-4 weeks. The five-page issues take a deeper look at topics that we address on the podcast. For example, last week we released Issue 2 which focused on how to implement the four patterns of observation in your school. Each issue includes nuts and bolts of implementation, discussion questions for your team, and even a section on how to apply the techniques if you are working in isolation. You can find a subscription link on my website at https://www.frederickbuskey.com/quadrant2.html As a bonus, if you subscribe this week you’ll be able to download the first two issues of Quadrant2 so you won’t have missed any opportunities to learn and grow.

Celebrations:

My recent trip to Kenya. My biggest takeaway is how similar we all are. Our struggles are the same – raising families, pursuing our dreams, and contributing to our communities. We may look and sound different, and our families, dreams, and communities my take different forms, but we all want the same thing. In a time of divisiveness, in the world and here at home, it is worth remembering that people are people, and therefore deserving of respect. We need to treat each other based on our commonalities, not on how our political and social “leaders” tell us we should treat people from different parties, or states, or countries.

The Big Idea

· We know the reasons why each procedure we teach is important, but by being more thoughtful – and explicit – about the goals we want to achieve, we can make small but powerful tweaks to our procedures.

The Why

· My passion for procedures:

o OSU experience

o Teaching experience

o Coordinating entry-year teacher programs

o How poor procedural classroom prevent leaders from growing teachers

· Good procedures decrease discipline referrals. Even a one referral decrease in a week yields and average of five minutes per day that you can invest in growing teachers. That’s enough time to make a difference with a new, struggling, or even veteran teacher.

The what (MVP version)

For years I have taught that a good procedure has five components:

Title or name (may be an acronym)
Steps (1-5)
Key words for each step
Acronym for the steps
Graphic (necessity varies with age)

In prepping for a workshop with a middle school teaching staff in August, I realized that I should be better about emphasizing the why – the goals of a procedure.

I began by looking at a sample routine for entering class. The procedure had four parts – Sit, Arrange your stuff, write based on a prompt, and stand when finished. I called it SAWS:

· Sit

· Arrange

· Write

· Stand

The goals of a beginning class procedure are obvious: it saves time. If we can get started in 60 seconds instead of 180 seconds, we can save 300+ minutes over the course of a school year. That’s over a week of class time!

But as I began writing down this goal, others naturally appeared. Before I go further, I’m going to give you ten seconds of silence to think about the goals of a good beginning class routine. Besides saving time, what else should the procedure achieve?

Here’s what I came up with:

· Connect with teacher

· Maximize learning time

· Minimize distractions and misbehaviors

· Empower students to be responsible for their own learning

· Focus students on learning

· Begin anticipatory set (optional)

What I was most excited about was that first goal – connecting with the teacher. Sure, the teacher can check in with the students, but what if a part of the procedure directed the students to check in with the teacher? What if every class began with every student making some kind of contact with the teacher? How cool would that be? How humanizing could it be?

Most teachers have one or more students that need that connection, and for whom the teacher should know the student’s emotional state. Making a small tweak to an opening class procedure creates an opportunity for that.

And so, I added a step to my sample procedure. The first thing students do is to say hello to the teacher. What hello looks like will vary with the teacher and the students, but here are some options:

· Actually say hello

· Give a fist bump

· Or a thumb’s up

· Or share one thing that happened in the past 24 hours

· Or flash a number of fingers to indicate their emotional strength, for example one for terrible, need to talk, up to five for excellent.

Maybe I’m being silly here, maybe most teachers already do this – but if they do, I haven’t seen it. So I’m going to hold onto this as being a good idea.

Here’s what I’d like you to take away from this episode:

Think about the multiple goals and opportunities that exist within each procedure.
Begin observing procedures at work in classrooms and challenge yourself to find opportunities to achieve more with any given procedure.
Engage your teachers in informal discussions. Tell them you’ve been doing some PD on procedures that has made you think about their goals. Review a procedure with the teacher and work together to identify explicit goals.

Challenges

As always, the challenge in following up on this idea is priority management. Without being intentional and prioritizing teacher development, you’ll get too busy to follow up. Try taking time during the first hour of the day to check in on some teachers’ beginning class procedures and have a brief conversation after the kids have left the building but before the teachers have. Make it a priority, for a few minutes over the course of a few days.

Show Outro

That wraps up today’s content focused episode. We’ll be back next week with Josh Stamper talking about the concrete steps he took as an AP implementing restorative practices in a Texas middle school. If you are interested in restorative practices, you might want to go back and listen to episode 20 with Dr. Gabby Grant discussing the challenges and prerequisites to implementing restorative practices. It was a great episode – one that made it onto our greatest hits list from our first 50 episodes.

If you enjoyed today’s show, please subscribe and rate this podcast.

You can ask questions, make requests and give us feedback at frederick@frederickbuskey.com. If you’d like more content tailored towards the needs of assistant principals, you can head over to my website at frederickbuskey.com. And remember to subscribe to our free micro-journal, Quadrant2. If you subscribe now you’ll receive access to las week’s issue on implementing the four patterns of observation. I’ll also include my sample entering class routine for your enjoyment!

That wraps up today’s show! I’m Frederick Buskey and I hope you’ll join me next time for the Assistant Principal Podcast. Cheers!

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Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast. I’m your host Frederick Buskey. The goal of this podcast is to help improve the life and leadership of assistant principals. Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of October 22-28, 2022. If you already get my daily leadership emails, then I hope you’ll find some added value here and if you don’t already subscribe you can find a link on my home page at frederickbuskey.com. Many readers like to begin their mornings by reading the email and setting a leadership intention for the day, but please don’t feel any pressure to subscribe. You are already doing more to grow yourself than many others out there, simply by listening to the podcast.

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Show Notes, Episode 67: Blooming Where You Are Planted with Robyn Jackon

About this show:

“As an assistant principal, you must learn to bloom where you are planted. If you do, you will open up huge opportunities to make a meaningful difference right now in your career and build the skills you need to make an even greater difference once you become a principal.”
These aren’t my wise words. They were first spoken by Dr. Robyn Jackson, addressing a common concern of assistant principals: How do you grow your own leadership in the shadow, or at least presence, of another leader?

Notable Quotes

Robyn Jackson

“But when you're a builder, nobody has to move because you can build wherever you are. And so I think that's kind of one of the main differences between leadership and builderdership that creates space for other people.” 2:40

“Because then you build the muscles of of of truly being the person who is the builder in the building, that you know the builder in chief in your school building. And those skills transfer over to the principal ship when most of the other skills we learned as an AP don't transfer” 10:45

“He said something that just stopped me in my tracks and I couldn't stop thinking about, which is he said bosses say go and leaders say let's go. And I've heard that before. That's, you know, that's a great distinction. But then he said builders. Say come and and in that one simple sentence, I'd started to to to see the answer to some of the problems that I've been frustrated about in education” 14:20

“And how do you get your people committed to that compelling purpose? And therefore things you're going to do, feedback, support, accountability and culture. That's the only four things you can do to positively influence your teacher's behaviors.” 16:27

“Then your conversations, whether they're formal or informal, become more about teacher growth and serving students than they do about fulfilling the requirements of the evaluation cycle. And so you don't have to straddle 2 worlds anymore. You turn the thing that you have to do into the thing that you want to do anyway, so that you're always every conversation helping teachers grow” 24:27

“ You have to sell things to the district, the idea about why we're going to do something or not doing, or you have to sell the idea to parents or to your community. We need to get good at selling our ideas, and the assistant principal is the assistant principal. Ship is a great way to practice that, you know, how do you see something that needs work in the school, and how do you, how do you present that idea to a principal in a way that the principal sees not only the merit and the idea, but is willing to take the risk of implementing your idea” 30:50

“If you can take yourself out of the hero spot, let them be the hero, and you put yourself in the guide position. You will always, always be able to get your story across in the way, or get your advice or your ideas across in a way that people can welcome them.” 35:54

“You owe it to yourself. You owe it to us. You owe it to the students and the families you serve. To instead of trying to be some cookie cutter version of of what somebody else's idea of an administrator is. To be yourself, but not just yourself, your best self, that's that's the, that's the ultimate role” 39:30

“Focus on being your best self, because if you can do that, you can really step into that the role will be the right role will be waiting for you” 41:00

“it's not just grow where you're planted, bloom where your planet. It does two things. First of all, it makes your work so much more fulfilling and rewarding right now. Secondly, it does change people's lives for the better. But thirdly, this is almost counterintuitive. By blooming where you're planted, you get more recognition than if you try to conform into what the district wants you to be anyway, because there's only one of you.” 42:54

Frederick

“One of the best principles I know. Doesn't respond email You know, there are a few, but if you want to get in touch with him, emails not the way, because he doesn't do email, because he's out in classrooms working with teachers. So it's interesting that people, I think. If you're doing it right and executing on that vision and making a case for that, there's, I think we get more latitude than than what we think we can get.” 29:47

“We make a lot of assumptions about the systems we're in and what the systems want from us. And I think in your story what you show us is a lot of times our assumptions aren't correct” 47:43

Links:

School Leadership Reimagined: https://schoolleadershipreimagined.com

Buildership University: https://buildershipuniversity.com/

My email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com

The Assistant Principal Podcast website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/appodcast.html

Website: www.frederickbuskey.com

Blog: www.frederickbuskey.com/blog (reposts of the daily email)

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2022-10-21_68_Five for Friday Final Audio Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast I'm your host, Frederick Busky. The goal of this podcast is to improve life and leadership for assistant principals. Today's episode of five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of October seventeenth through twenty first. With a caveat. Although we did indeed publish these emails this week, they are actually repeats from our list of greatest hits. This week as well as next week, I am in Kenya and so we just thought that this would be a fun way to kind of cover our bases, but also still continue to provide you some value while I'm away playing and learning and being in schools in Kenya. So I hope you enjoy this recap. The topic of Monday's message was leadership, isolation, and I hope you're subscribing to the daily list because one of my all time favorite photographs was included as part of this daily email and it is a black and white photo of somebody standing in a puddle with a box over their head. When I first saw this photo, it just made me think of the isolation and the loneliness that can come with leadership. I didn't really go into anything in the email that talked about how to break that, break that isolation down, but I just asked readers to come sit with that and think about their own feelings. Think about how you can take care of yourself. And break down some of that isolation. You see things and you say why, but I dream things that never were, and I say why not? That quotes from George Bernard Shaw in 1949 and the topic of Tuesday's email is vision. I thought this was a nice juxtaposition from Monday's email of a leader with a box over their head. I have to admit that I have a love hate relationship with vision. I used to believe very strongly and passionately that it was a leader's job to provide vision. And then I had a leader that came into my organization and completely trashed it. In my mind he trashed it and he had his own vision. And despite there being lots of people that had invested many years in the organization, he came in from the outside and just imposed his vision over everything. And that constituted a lot of destruction of programs and really damaging people. So I've become. Kind of very skeptical about the idea that leaders come in and impose a vision from outside. I think what we need to be focusing more on is the development of shared vision. And when we talk about visionary leadership, I think what we really should be talking about is the expectation that leaders can come in and create space for people to talk about their own dreams and goals and aspirations, and that leaders can facilitate a group of people sharing that and finding the commonality and developing a vision that is common to the participants. The people within the organization and that then the leader can really give voice to that and help keep people focused on that vision. Speaking of vision, Wednesday's email was about the difference between Mission, vision and goals, and I told the story of a trip that Pam and I took in the summer of 20. 21 So Pam is my wife, the other doctor Buskey. And in the summer of 2021 we jumped in an SUV and drove across country visiting all kinds of parks and things. And so I used that trip to talk about the mission, which the mission was to reconnect with family and friends and to have memorable experiences in nature. That's what we were going out to do. Vision is about the outcome resulting from enacting or fulfilling your mission. So our goal was to reconnect with family that were, excuse me, our mission was to reconnect with family and have memorable experiences. The vision was that we would drive home renewed in multiple ways, with a new set of memories and a great appreciation for our country, its people, and its beauty. Now, goals are the achievements that will help you fulfill your mission. So for our trip, some of our goals were backpack in the Badlands Backpacking Glacier Park, visit my friend Nat and Klamath Falls, spend time with my mom in San Francisco, and visit other family on the way home. Now, as it turned out, we did not meet all those goals. Yet we still achieved the mission and we still fulfilled our vision. So remember, the goals were places we would visit and things we would do. The mission was to reconnect with family and have memorable experiences, and the vision was that those experiences would leave us renewed and connected when we got home. So how could we achieve the mission and the vision if we didn't achieve the goals? Well, what happened was the summer of 2021 there was a massive heat wave across the northwest. And so some of the things that we wanted to do we just, we got cooked out of and so we had to change our plans. So we wound up not backpacking in the Badlands and we didn't backpack in Glacier Park. But that's OK, because one of the things that we sometimes do is we get so focused on goals that we forget why we have the goals, right? The goals are just kind of measurement steps on the way to achieving the mission and the vision. And there are a lot of times when the goals stop making sense for whatever reason. So when you're thinking about your organization and the mission and the vision and goals, yes, you want to attend to the goals, but don't get too focused on the goals. Always check and make sure that you're actually making progress on the mission. Because that's the most important thing. The title of Thursday's email was are you a force multiplier? And this email was inspired by something my good friend and colleague Doctor Robert Maddox sent me about the human touch and the human touch as being a force multiplier. The idea here is that connecting with people builds community, and that community creates strength, resilience and hope. So I offered three things that people could do. Each one of those would take less than three minutes and challenged readers to execute on one of these things to create connectivity and build community and thereby be a force multiplier because leaders are force multipliers. So the first thing was to me, call or email someone that you worked with this week and express gratitude. The second thing was to get together with another leader and identify a strategic behavior that you can implement next week. For example, engaging in five minute coaching and commit to being each other's accountability partners in executing that strategy. And the third one was a little bit selfish. I encouraged people to email me with an example of how something this week helped you to help someone else or a topic that you'd like me to write about in the future. And I do hope, if you are on the email list and you got this email on thursday, I hope you acted. I hope you took that opportunity to be intentional and to do something to reach out and create connectivity and build community with someone, whether that's me or somebody else. And if you're not on the email list and you're hearing this now on a Friday afternoon or maybe a Saturday. I encourage you to challenge yourself me call or email someone you worked with this week and just express gratitude. Work with another leader and think about a strategy that you could use next week to build community, build connection with people, and then hold each other accountable for doing it or. When you're done with this podcast, go ahead and email me and tell me something about this past week that you did to help someone else or send me a topic that you'd like me to write about. And finally, on Friday, we revisited the idea of m - V divided by E motivation equals value divided by effort. There was a graphic included in that you could print out and put up by your computer or on a wall somewhere. I just think M - V divided by E is so powerful. I won't elaborate on it hugely, but the idea is that increased value, decreased effort leads to increased motivation. And if we want people to be more motivated, what we can do is either increase value, decrease effort, or do both of those things. And I think where the power lies in this is that it gets us out of the judgment game. If we're trying to lead something or do something and people aren't following, people aren't doing what we want them to do. It's not about them being lazy or unmotivated or resistant. It's simply a mathematical formula. If people aren't doing what we want them to do, it's because that the given value or what they perceive as a value is not worth the perceived effort. And so we need to stop judging and start moving into problem solving mode and figure out how do we increase value? How do we decrease effort? So that's the week. I can't tell you that there's a single big takeaway. I think it's just really about being intentional and being mindful, checking in with yourself. Checking on that isolation, but then also checking in on other people and working to build community and connect to think about as a leader. How you're bringing people together and helping them articulate a vision and how you're expressing a shared vision and then got not getting too hung up on the goals. Yeah, their guideposts, but sometimes we need to go around them or go off in a different direction, direction. What's really important is the mission. Ok, this wraps up this week's five for Friday rendition of the Assistant Principal podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe and rate this podcast. Rating the podcast really does help other people find it. I'm always trying to improve this show, so if you have feedback for me, please email at frederick buskey dot com. Or if you want to share something else, one of those stories about how you helped someone this past week or direction that you'd like me to write about that would be great. If you'd like to find out more about what I'm doing to support assistant principals, you can head over to my website at frederickhusky.com backslash the assistant. Principal i'm frederick busky. I hope you'll join me next time for the Assistant Principal podcast cheers.

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Have you ever popped into a classroom, just to see what’s going on, and have the teacher stop the lesson and begin explaining to you what they are doing? Or have them continue teaching but give that look of, “what are you doing in my classroom?” Or, after one of these pop-ins, had the teacher run to you after class and want to know if you thought they did okay?

None of these things is helpful, and they stem from a common problem – the inadequate language of classroom observations.

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Today's episode of five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of October 3rd through seventh twenty, twenty two. If you already get my daily leadership emails, then I hope you'll find some added value here. And if you don't already subscribe, you can find a link on my homepage at frederickbuskey.com Many readers like to begin their mornings by reading the email and setting a leadership intention for the day.

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Show Notes, Episode 63: Productive Disruption with Dr. Mary Hemphill

About this show:

Ship is sinking (may 26, 2022, Ep 28)The teacher shortage is not going awayThe academic setbacks from COVID will ripple through our schools for ten yearsContinued trauma has exacerbated already challenging mental health issues among our students, their families, and even our teachers.Politics – enough said.
The only thing that’s constant is change. Organizations have this strange property in which they are always changing and yet always resisting change. The past two school years have created stress, loss, and incredible turmoil. They have also created an opportunity. Let’s be real:
The new normal is abnormal and our old systems aren’t working anymore. Instead of mourning and lamenting, what if we embraced this moment? What if we continued the work of dismantling and then rebuilding what school looks like? The last big wave of educational reform was the standards movement of the 1980’s. Like so many reforms, the promises have not been kept. So, what’s possible? What’s next? What can we do?

Notable Quotes

Guest

Instead of lamenting and mourning what we've lost, I'm wondering, can we embrace this moment?

over 54 % of today's professionals over the past two years have heightened anxiety, heightened burnout, heightened isolation and heightened loneliness

we're incubating great human beings and bringing resources that we've never thought about before into the school building. It's assessing our mental health resources. It's asking questions about support instead of asking teachers. Hey, are you OK? Saying, have you taken time to rest and recenter today

Are you scheduling yourself? And they're like, what do you mean by that? I said, well, you put your board meetings on there, you put your back to school meetings, your open houses. You put all of those things on there. Are you scheduling you?

So when you explore your inner territory as a leader, yes, you're going to uncover things. No, it's not always going to be in a nice, pretty package, but maybe what you uncover, whether it's in your research, whether it's in your reflection. Whether you simply do a staycation and, you know, tell your family, hey, listen, I have to invest in myself. But if you don't invest in yourself in the beginning, you can't reap the reward later.

I talk a lot about nomenclature and the way that we call out certain things. So for instance, self-care has absolutely, positively become a buzzword.

Self-awareness is literally asking the questions to say, OK, what kind of leader do I want to be in my personal and professional life? And then taking time to answer that question.

I'm a human being and not a human doing.

You are the leader. You're not the assistant follower. You're the assistant principal.

I always tell leaders that 60 % of what we do moving forward should be people centered, 40 % business center. And I think that that percentage is going to allow us to bring our students, bring our teachers, bring our community with us rather than leave them at the precipice of what's happening in education imagine.

We're big people, inspiring little people to be able to do life well. Life looks different, so we have to employ different resources and different strategies.
We need to come together more in the school community than we are polarizing one another.

When we talk about disruption, we have to remember that this is not going to look the way that it used to.

Have the courage to take time to spend with yourself. Put yourself on your calendar.

This is not about twenty-first century leadership. This is about the impact that your leadership in the twenty first century is going to make in the twenty second century.

Frederick

People are realizing that the old ways are absolutely not going to fit into the boxes. Let's just take the box out for recycling. The box is gone

I'm still hearing about driving new curricula and introducing new, new teaching things. And just bringing all this stuff onto teachers who are just trying to survive. And I think we do need to really move from what we think our teachers need to, building those relationships, focusing on those relationships and through that understanding, having our teachers tell us what they need.

There's a really consistent theme, and that theme is that change begins within ourselves.

we have to shift from being task focused to people focused

Coming into this school and me seeing who you are before I see what you are. And again going back to that task focus when we're task focused. And when we're prioritizing time, we're focused on what you are. Because understanding who you are. That that takes a different, you know, I've got to be present for that. I can't be worried about those other things. My priority has to be you.

the common thread that works through all those leaders that we've talked to that have inspired us. Is an they know who they are. And they're authentic about who they are.

Having the courage to take care of yourself. I think it's harder than having the courage to take care of other people.

Links:

My email: frederick@frederickbuskey.com

The Assistant Principal Podcast website: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/appodcast.html

Website: www.frederickbuskey.com

Blog: www.frederickbuskey.com/blog (reposts of the daily email)

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2022-09-27_62_Five for Friday_FINAL AUDIO