B.Y.O.T Bring Your Own Thoughts
The latest on all student-centered models, leadership development, strategic planning, teacher retention, and all things innovation in K-12 education. We answer questions before you think to ask them.
District Leadership | School Leadership
In a previous blog, “Implementing the Best in Imperfect Conditions” Chelle Minnihan and I skimmed the surface of three essential conditions for effective implementation. Now, we venture deeper into these crucial aspects and how they can help you achieve your district’s goals.
Share
Education Elements | Organizational Leadership & Change Management
I don’t know about you, but I definitely feel a shift in how we live in this world. Day-to-day life feels a bit slower. Receiving Amazon deliveries the next day seems the norm, and whether or not your favorite restaurant will be closed due to staffing or delivery limitations is increasingly common. It’s not rare for apps on your phone to be buggy with the latest release, or for the remodeling of your home to take twice as long or cost twice as much as it did pre-pandemic. As I write this, there’s daily news about the fallout from the failures of FTX in the crypto markets, and the war in Ukraine has continued for almost a year.
Share
Get free weekly tips and advice designed for leaders like you.
Education Elements | Organizational Leadership & Change Management
In 2021 we navigated a lot of change and ambiguity. Life felt at times, hectic and unpredictable, but there was also a slowing down. There were shortages; so we waited longer for everything from household supplies to PCR tests. We saw inflation creep up, and so we waited to buy things; and, we changed our purchasing habits. Stores and restaurants reduced hours due to staffing issues and lowered demand. So while there was great uncertainty, this slowing down also made many families question everything from where they wanted to live, to the types of jobs they wanted to have, to their values and how they want their children educated.
Share
District Leadership | Innovative Leadership | Personalized Learning | School Leadership | Teams & Culture | Virtual Learning
I got started with this tradition of predictions in 2010 after reading Disrupting Class, a book by Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn. In their book, they predicted that by 2019, 50% of all high school courses will be online in some blended learning model. That was a pretty bold prediction in 2008 when the book was published, but their model for cycles of innovation seems pretty accurate now that we have hindsight. Even as of May 2019, there were people pointing out the failure of this prediction. Now at the end of 2020, I’d estimate that +95% of all K-12 students took some form of an online class, and most likely this trend will continue into 2021.
Share
Organizational Leadership & Change Management | Remote Work
To close out this series on how to get your organization primed for remote work, I’d like to explore some pitfalls of working remotely and share tips for avoiding them. It can be easy for virtual meetings to get very tactical since participants are wary of conversations that are too long and fail to stimulate them. This can lead to several other issues that can derail a meeting. To avoid this pitfall, it’s important to have a strong facilitator that can bring people together to agree on a set of protocols and norms for any given meeting. Such norms might include not having side conversations, so as to not distract others.
Share
Organizational Leadership & Change Management | Remote Work
Distributing information in an organization can sometimes feel like playing telephone. When we need to share information with teammates, it can be easy to start small, by having side conversations with colleagues sitting nearby. If you know how telephone is played, you know that this can be a recipe for disaster, with people passing on diluted information they did not have adequate time to reflect on. However, in a remote work environment, we have an opportunity to think about how we can distribute information quickly and equally throughout an organization to avoid confusion and misalignment.
Share