"The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes |
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In my 15 years as a principal I have learned many lessons about what makes a school successful. In past news articles I discussed instructional initiatives that enabled my school to make major gains in student achievement and helped my District to be awarded with State and National recognition. For this article I will briefly summarize the leadership imperatives that were essential for the instructional initiatives to be successful.
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- Touch Hearts and Minds – For an initiative to catch on and be truly successful it must come from the inside out. To create true change a leader must get into the hearts and minds of their people. To accomplish this, the leader must establish the moral purpose of the initiative. Fullan (2001) believes that establishing moral purpose is the foundation for successful change. To make a real difference a leader must go beyond simply giving orders, mandates and memos to staff directing them to follow rules and procedures. The leader must get into the hearts and minds of the staff to make real change. In education we are lucky because we can see how our work directly affects the lives of our students. It is imperative that leaders make this connection with their staff before they begin a new program. If you can’t directly make this connection, then the leader must truly examine if this is a worthy initiative.
- Empower Others – A leader cannot do it all alone. To successfully implement a program a leader must work cooperatively with others, have open dialogue, discussions and empower others to help lead the effort. Getting to know the strengths and motivations of the staff is essential to gathering support and capitalize on the expertise and talents of staff members. Knowing how to effectively use shared decision making to empower others and distribute leadership is essential to program development and creating professional learning communities. DuFour (2005).
- Be on the Front Lines of Change – An effective leader gets directly involved in every aspect of an initiative. This includes working with staff on developing the program, going to inservice training with the group and actually implementing the program. It is rare in education that principals, directors and superintendents participate in actual teaching and this is a shame because this maybe the most meaningful way to gain true insight into what is actually working and to have rich dialogue on what needs to be done to make a program as successful as possible. It allows the leader to gain situational awareness (Marzano, 2005) and fosters a sense of respect in the teachers that brings credibility and trust.
Read the entire article here. |
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Designed for schools and districts who want to create large scale change, this package contains research-based and field-tested resources for student success and closing achievement gaps. Receive 10 or 50 copies of Failure Is Not an Option®, a copy of the
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Failure Is Not an Option®
6 Principles for Making Student Success the ONLY Option
More than 100,000 leaders throughout North America, China, India, and South Africa are using Failure Is Not an Option® to access the most up-to-date approaches to building "courageous" leadership capacity and learning communities that sustain student and school success. As Michael Fullan wrote, "Failure Is Not an Option® addresses all the elements that are absolutely necessary for effective and enduring educational reform. It is a deeply passionate call to arms, combined with the wherewithal to take systematic, continuous, and effective action." |
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Effective Assessment for Effective Learning:
Seven Instructional Principles for Guiding Student Achievement
This DVD is based on the ASCD Leadership article titled "Seven Practices for Effective Learning," (McTighe and O’Connor, 2005) and features Jay McTighe, Linda Darling-Hammond, Carol Tomlinson, Larry Bell, Michael Fullan and many others. The DVD also demonstrates how schools in two high-performing, diverse districts use well designed classroom assessments and grading practices to provide specific, personalized and timely information to guide both teaching and learning.
Specifically, this DVD is divided into three parts—diagnostic, formative and summative assessments—demonstrating how to:
• Use summative assessments to frame meaningful performance goals (and three common errors in doing this!)
• Best develop and use diagnostics before the teaching even begins
• Offer appropriate choices for students to demonstrate their learning
• Provide constructive feedback that is motivational and enhances learning
• Encourage student assessment and goal-setting
• Make grading meaningful and fair so as to keep students learning and engaged
Each Effective Assessment for Effective Learning resource is accompanied by a facilitator’s guide and bonus DVD of additional interviews with the featured experts and practitioners. Additionally, all of our resources carry a money-back GUARANTEE.
Call by March 31 and receive a copy with a 30-day preview period. If you are not satisfied, we will cancel your invoice immediately upon receiving the returned resource(s). You are only responsible for the cost of shipping the resource(s) and insuring that the resource(s) are returned within 30 days in resalable condition.
For more information, click here or email leadership@hopefoundation.org.
| Making the Most of Professional Learning Communities |
| by Jay McTighe |
A growing number of educators are involved in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) within their schools. Once a PLC structure is established and communities are formed, a set of substantive questions must be addressed: What is the role of PLCs within a school? How do we insure that a PLC achieves its desired results? What should teachers be doing when they meet in learning teams? In other words, how do we make the most of Professional Learning Communities?
The first series published in our December 2009 newsletter discussed the role of Professional Learning Communities serving as a critical friend. The second series in our January 2010 newsletter addressed looking at student work in teams. This last segment focuses on the continuous learner.
Professional Role #3 – Continuous Learner
A middle school Principal asked the faculty to come up with a list of the most promising-sounding "best practices" in the field appropriate for their school. This eventual list was whittled down to six (e.g. differentiated instruction, authentic assessment, etc.). He then asked each staff member to join with three to five other teachers to form a working research and development PLC on any one of the six identified topics. Their job over the course of the next two years was to investigate, try out, and report to the faculty on their learning about the "best practice" and its effects on student learning. Many of the staff at the school reported that this single action dramatically changed the culture of the school and led to demonstrable improvements in student attitude and achievement.
Read the entire article here.
To see these techniques in action in McTighe’s latest video series, Effective Assessment for Effective Learning, click here.
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Jay McTighe brings a wealth of experience developed during a rich and varied career in education. He served as Director of the Maryland Assessment Consortium, a state collaboration of school districts working together to develop and share formative performance assessments. Prior to this position, Jay was involved with school improvement projects at The Maryland State Department of Education.
In February Jay will be speaking at our upcoming institute in San Antonio.
©Wiggins, Grant and McTighe, Jay (2007) Schooling by Design.
This article has been published by Ontario ASCD and The Learning Principal (NSDC).
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| What’s Working in the Steelton-Highspire School District? |
| by Deborah Wortham Ed.D. |
Common Mission, Vision, Values and Goals! Can you imagine? What will our classrooms look like in June 2010? Will our students be proficient in reading, mathematics, science, writing, and other assessed areas? Will we know what teaching strategies engaged elementary, middle, and high school students best to learn rigorous content? And why our students liked the way their teachers integrated technology into their lessons? Answering these questions continuously leads to understanding "what works."
In my first year as superintendent, our entire district did a book study on the Failure Is Not an Option Six Principles. It led the transformation to improving student achievement by guiding us in formulating an astounding mission statement for the district;
"We work in professional learning communities to educate and develop the whole child to compete, produce, and learn in our ever-changing society- Failure Is Not an Option."
Data-Driven. From our student performance on PSSA tests in the 2008-09 school year, we learned:
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- In reading at the elementary school level, our students continued to meet all Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) targets except for the IEP sub-group and, at the high school level, they increased and met all AYP targets.
- In reading for grades 4-8, with the exception of grade 5, students made at least a year’s growth and for grade 11, with confidence, all students made at least a year’s growth.
- In mathematics at the elementary school level, our students increased performance and met all AYP targets, including four sub-groups that surpassed the state target and, at the high school level, they met all AYP targets except for the black student sub-group.
- In mathematics for grades 4-8, students made at least a year’s growth and for grade 11, students projected to be Basic/Below Basic made at least a year’s growth.
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These results describe our students’ performance in the spring 2009. They helped us to discover specific performance groups for targeted interventions, specific performance groups for targeted growth, and where we need to adjust our instruction for increased student growth -- all of which help to envision increased levels of student performance in June 2010 and thereafter.
Read the entire article here.
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Deborah Wortham Ed.D. In over 35 years in the educational field, Dr. Deborah Wortham has gained a variety of experience, developing her excellent leadership and management skills. She is currently a superintendent, but she has served education in many capacities throughout her career, including as a teacher, program facilitator, assistant principal, and principal at the school level, as well as district-wide director of professional development and an area academic officer. During this time she has earned numerous awards and honors, including the Kathleen Cooper-Wright Dissertation of the Year, Teacher of the Year, and Outstanding Principal.
This February Deborah will be speaking at our institute in Houston.
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| Upcoming Professional Development Opportunities |
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