Principal Matters: The School Leader's Podcast with William D. Parker

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Principal Matters: The School Leader's Podcast with William D. Parker episodes

March 01, 2017 PMP 056: Reaching Generation iY and iGen Students
A few years ago, I was talking to a senior student, Jesse, who was publishing his first book. He shared with me that he had a great opportunity to speak at a gathering of authors at a book conference. Later, he was invited to a number of middle schools to share with younger students his […]
The post PMP 056: Reaching Generation iY and iGen Students appeared first on Principal Matters.
21 min
March 01, 2017 PMP 056: Reaching Generation iY and iGen Students
A few years ago, I was talking to a senior student, Jesse, who was publishing his first book.
He shared with me that he had a great opportunity to speak at a gathering of authors at a book conference. Later, he was invited to a number of middle schools to share with younger students his passion for writing. I asked him if I could attend one of his presentations, and it was amazing to watch him communicating ideas and inspiration to groups of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders.
Over the next few months, Jesse would stop by my office, and we would talk about his dreams and plans. Because he was so teachable, I pointed him toward resources to help him start blogging, creating an email subscription list, and leveraging his social media options. We explored ways he might maximize opportunities before starting college.
As a result, Jesse began building a platform for his writing, ideas, and creative projects before he even graduated high school. He stayed in contact with readers and students he had met through his content and events. He is in college now, has published his second book, and is hosting his own podcast. (Check out his website jessehaynesauthor.com to see his profile, books, and podcast links!)
Jesse has exceptional gifts, drive, and opportunities for someone his age. And as I watch other students like him pursuing their futures, I realize that this generation faces options for careers that my generation never knew. Today’s students no longer have to wait for permission or continuing education to begin connecting, designing, creating or sharing ideas.
When I think about my own children entering the adult world and the students in my school, I realize they have amazing options:

* No longer is their potential work or industry path tied simply to location or geography.
* No longer is their potential to learn, practice, or experiment with ideas limited to a school or institution.
* No longer is their network of future employers, mentors, or clients limited to face-to-face interactions.

I think it safe to say that our students have more options for opportunities than any other generation in history. But with all the options comes the dilemma of understanding these options, harnessing them, and utilizing them without simply feeling overwhelmed.
Tim Elmore explores the unique opportunities and challenges that our younger generations face in his book Generation iY.

The iY Generation typically encompasses those born somewhere after 1990. They are the teens and college-age students who have never known a world without the Internet. Elmore also touches on the generation of students now stepping into the limelight: the iGen students who typically represent those born after the tragedies of September 11, 2001. This emerging generation has never known a world without global terrorism, economic uncertainty, or political unrest. Both the iY Generation and iGen students, however, have amazing opportunities and potential for making a difference in the world.
On a side note, it is safe to say that all generations have had potential to change their worlds. Think about the lessons we’ve seen in history:

* The rise and fall of ancient civilizations;
* The cultural and religious upheavals from the birth of printing press during the Reformation;
* The social and economic impacts of the Industrial Revolution;
21 min
February 22, 2017 PMP 055: Spring Semester & Beta-Testing
When I was boy, my parents would often stop by a decrepit farmhouse where they had first lived after being married. My great-grandfather had built it in the early 1900’s with a big front porch, two chimneys, and a tin roof. A large pear tree grew in the front yard, and in the spring, yellow […]
The post PMP 055: Spring Semester & Beta-Testing appeared first on Principal Matters.
18 min
February 22, 2017 PMP 055: Spring Semester & Beta-Testing
When I was boy, my parents would often stop by a decrepit farmhouse where they had first lived after being married.
My great-grandfather had built it in the early 1900’s with a big front porch, two chimneys, and a tin roof. A large pear tree grew in the front yard, and in the spring, yellow jonquils (or buttercups as we called them) would cover the hillside there. The Old House was no longer inhabitable, but it had become a place where family members stored old furniture or other odds and ends.
I still remember wandering through the sunlit rooms filled with scattered furniture and trunks and imagining what life was like for my ancestors who once lived there without cars or indoor plumbing. One spring when my dad butchered a hog, he wrapped up the hams and carried them to The Old House where he stored the meat in a large wooden box filled with salt. Weeks later, we retrieved the hams from the saltbox and had salted pork for weeks to come.
When I see buttercups, I often think of The Old House. And this is normally the time of year for blooms to emerge. At the same time, spring time brings up other questions about what is in store for our school. For instance, what steps are we taking now that might leave impressions or blooms for the coming school year?
Spring Time & Learning Goals
One of the mistakes we often make is not planning long before the next season of school. As school leaders, we can come up with some great ideas on improvements, but we often fail to include our team in planning, developing, testing, and implementing them far in advance. As a result, teachers grow weary of being introduced to a new schedule or target when they return to a new school year. What would happen, if instead, we began those conversations a semester or even a year before implementing something new?
This week we met with teachers for a professional development day. As we looked at goals for the second semester of this school year, we asked: What actions, lessons, relationships, or decisions are we taking now that may affect next school year or years to come? We picked up a conversation we’ve been having since last fall on how we can better influence students learning essential skills. One area where we need to grow is in better remediating students on critical skills. So just this week, our faculty pulled together to reflect remediation schedules that we are piloting or beta-testing throughout the spring semester.
A Case-Study In Beta-Testing
Last summer, I remember coming across a post by A.J. Julani on The Beginner’s Guide to Design Thinking in the Classroom. As I looked at the steps of building prototypes, I began asking: how could this apply to school-wide initiatives? In other words, if my role as a school leader is to see my entire school as a macro-version of a classroom, how can I use these same design-thinking tips to affect our school-wide planning?
So last semester, when we realized our schedule was not structured well for supporting remediation pullouts, we commissioned a team to brainstorm ideas and draft some new trial-schedules. Then we decided to beta-test these through the second semester as ideas for next school year. This team came up with what they called GRIT schedules: GRIT stands for “Growth Requires Intense Teamwork.”
Last Friday we ran our first trial run with our new schedule, and this week, while students were on holiday for President’s Day holiday, we met for professional development so that we could talk about the pros and cons of our first beta-test. I’d like to share some of that feedback as model or case-study for anyone thinking of using prototypes or beta-tests for your own ideas:
Beta-Testing New Schedules
Here’s a breakdown of steps we took to prepare and test a first trial run on a proposed remedia...
18 min
February 15, 2017 PMP 054: 7 Tips on Rest & Rejuvenation
During my first two years in school admin, I barely slept, rarely exercised, and seldom had time for my family. I’ll never forget the night I was up late after my wife and I had put our four kids to bed. I had my laptop open when my wife sat down beside me. “Will,” she […]
The post PMP 054: 7 Tips on Rest & Rejuvenation appeared first on Principal Matters.
17 min
February 15, 2017 PMP 054: 7 Tips on Rest & Rejuvenation
During my first two years in school admin, I barely slept, rarely exercised, and seldom had time for my family.
I’ll never forget the night I was up late after my wife and I had put our four kids to bed. I had my laptop open when my wife sat down beside me.
“Will,” she said. “There’s something I need to say. The kids and I have accepted that you are a husband and dad on the weekends. The rest of the time, the school owns you.”
She didn’t say this with bitterness or anger, just simple resignation.
“In fact,” she concluded, “You just seem a shell of the man you used to be.”
I remember watching her leave the room, and I just sat there. I was giving everything I had to my work as a school leader. But in the process, I was abandoning those closest to me.
That night I made a decision. I opened my laptop and wrote a letter of resignation and placed it in a folder. The next morning I placed that folder on the corner of the desk in my office. Every time I looked at it, I would tell myself that either I was going to find a more balanced way to lead, or I was changing professions.
Thankfully, I began to slowly regain some balance in my personal life. And over the last twelve years, I think my wife and family would agree that I’m healthier because of it.
At the same time, I often run into weeks or seasons at work where the pace and stress can feel overwhelming. If you’ve read my blog before or listened to my podcasts, I talk a lot about ways to manage projects, increase efficiency, and surround yourself with valuable team members. All of these tips and lessons I’ve learned help us manage our time and energy more efficiently.
But no amount of courage, efficiency, or teamwork can protect you from the inevitable seasons of stress that come with any job involving service to others. That’s why I occasionally need to revisit my “letter of resignation” moment. Sometimes I do that by stealing away to my piano in the evening before bed. At other times, it is time in the backyard throwing football with my son, Jack. As a person of faith, this also includes practicing cycles of rest and worship.
Protecting One Day Each Week
I remember when I was in my fifth or sixth year of teaching, I realized I never really stopped working, even on the weekends. As a young Language Arts teacher, my weekends were usually consumed with chores, grading papers, and prepping for the upcoming week. One week, however, I made a commitment to schedule all my activities so that I could really take Sunday off to focus on worship and rest. What surprised me was how much more energized, creative, and productive I felt that next week. This soon became a habit. Occasionally I make exceptions to this plan, but for the most part I find myself more relaxed and focused each week when I can really rest before returning to work.
But no practice or habit is a silver bullet. When I became an assistant principal, for instance, I still practiced this weekly ritual, but it didn’t insulate me from the stresses I experienced in overcommitting myself to my new tasks in school leadership. Perhaps my habit of weekly rest helped me not completely implode, but I had to figure out how to apply this rhythm throughout my day and week where possible.
7 Simple Daily Routines
While I don’t pretend that my own experience is a perfect model for others, I am willing to reflect on some of the habits that have helped me over the years. At the risk of sounding like a grandpa, let me share some very simple take-aways. If you’re interested in ways to build routines of re-filling your emotional tank into the days and weeks of your school year, here are seven tips:
1. Arrive early.
I make it a habit to be the one who opens up the school in the morning. This gives me an opportunity to check my email, calendar, in-box, and gather my thoughts. Sometimes it allows me a few minutes of reading.
17 min
February 08, 2017 PMP 053: 3 Tips for Responding Under Pressure
When I was in high school and college, my brothers and I worked part-time diving for mussel shells in the Kentucky Lake area. We would sell them by the pound at local markets, and those shells would in turn be sold to Japanese markets. Apparently, the pearly-white cuts from those shells are unique implants for […]
The post PMP 053: 3 Tips for Responding Under Pressure appeared first on Principal Matters.
19 min
February 08, 2017 PMP 053: 3 Tips for Responding Under Pressure
When I was in high school and college, my brothers and I worked part-time diving for mussel shells in the Kentucky Lake area.
We would sell them by the pound at local markets, and those shells would in turn be sold to Japanese markets. Apparently, the pearly-white cuts from those shells are unique implants for growing cultured pearls in oysters.
One day I was climbing across the bottom of an area that was ten to twelve feet deep. The only sounds I could hear were the hissing breaths from my regulator. As I found shells, I placed them in a net-bag I had clipped to one side of my weight belt.
Because of low visibility, we didn’t swim with tanks on our backs. Instead my compressor, tank, and filtered line all connected to my boat. I was connected to a 50-foot air hose taped together with a 50-foot line of rope, and my regulator line was connected by a clip-on-hook to my weight belt at one end and attached to the boat and compressor at the other end. As I worked along an even stretch of clay and mud, I swept the surface with my hands while pulling the boat along with me.
Suddenly, I came up to a trotline. This was a problem. Above me somewhere, long fishing cords were stretched, weighted, and floating horizontally while in front of my face were the vertical lines interspersed with hanging hooks and bait. I didn’t like cutting these, so I tried maneuvering around this one instead.
But a few minutes later, I felt a pressure pulling on my line. I tried to turn around to pull back at my hose in case it was caught on a root or stump, but I couldn’t move it any further than a few inches. As I strained at the line, I finally saw where a few hooks from the trotline had snagged it. For some reason I decided it would better to unhook my regulator so I could hold the line in front of me and take out the hooks by hand. This seemed like a reasonable option, so I reached for the clip and flicked it open. Wrong decision.
In a flash, my regulator line jerked forward, and I was left biting my regulator’s rubber mouth piece as hard as I could while the line shook with amazing force. At the same moment, I also realized I couldn’t move forward toward my line because something was tethered to my back. Somehow I had been hooked in the back and my regulator was pulled away from me at the same time.
If this is hard to imagine, picture standing in a room with two doors. You are standing with your back stapled to one door while your only source of oxygen is a mouthpiece connected to a hose and tank on the other side of the room by the second door. Someone opens that door, picks up your oxygen tank and is walking away. Only your teeth in that regulator mouthpiece will keep you breathing.
Twelve feet under water, in a cloud of mud and clay, I was being pulled from two directions at the same time. With my free hand, I reached for my knife I kept sheathed around my leg and began cutting at any of the tangled trotline I could find. Soon I was free again. I reattached my line to my belt, breathed deeply again and followed the air-hose line back to my boat.
3 Lessons From A Close Call
Just in case you’re wondering, I didn’t make lake diving my life-time career. I still made dives for year afterwards, but I realize now how lucky I am to be telling that story. My point in telling that story is this: If I had not been prepared ahead of time for what do when under pressure, I could have easily never made it to the surface alive. I’ll talk about that more in a minute.
But first, think about your own school leadership. We may not face life-and-death situations on a daily basis, but we’re faced with amazing pressures all the time. Whether that involves managing student safety, resolving conflicts, directing personnel policies, prioritizing budgets, or advocating with elected officials–the list goes on and on with scenarios we face under pressure (sometimes many...
19 min
February 01, 2017 PMP 052: Starting a Movement of Kindness
Although I grew up in West Tennessee, I was born in San Diego, California when my dad was stationed there in the Navy. Some of my earliest toddler memories include playing on the beach while my dad and older brothers swam in the waves. Even though I was three or four years old, I still […]
The post PMP 052: Starting a Movement of Kindness appeared first on Principal Matters.
22 min
February 01, 2017 PMP 052: Starting a Movement of Kindness
Although I grew up in West Tennessee, I was born in San Diego, California when my dad was stationed there in the Navy.
Some of my earliest toddler memories include playing on the beach while my dad and older brothers swam in the waves. Even though I was three or four years old, I still remember seeing my first jellyfish, finding starfish, and playing in the sand.
My dad had a unique way of building sandcastles. He would begin by gathering a mound of wet sand into a pile. Then he would scoop handfuls of sand and water. He would slowly drip the sand-water onto the mound until a small hill began to form. Drip, drip, drip… Each little drop of water would evaporate in the sun, leaving the sand behind in whatever shape it had formed. Eventually, the mound would build until it looked like a tall volcano with rippling spires.
When I think about creating and building, I’m fascinated by the small, steady actions that overtime can create something awesome.
Building a Momentum of Positive Culture
Last week one of my teachers told me she was having a bad day. Some of her students had been challenging, and she was having a hard time keeping a positive outlook. After classes that day, she visited the girl’s bathroom.
She was surprised to see someone had a left a post-it note on the mirror that said, “You are enough.” Another note said, “You are loved.” Suddenly, she felt better and smiled at the kind sentiments.
There on the soap dispenser sat a notepad of sticky notes and a pen. A note on front said, “Take a sticky note and add your own!” Underneath it read another note saying, “I just want to let whoever did this know you are an amazing person, the world needs more people like you!”
And so throughout the day, girls added more notes: “We want the very best for you!” And on and on…
Before long someone decided to expand the display. A sheet of red butcher paper was hung on the wall with the inscription, “Take what you need! Give what you can!”
Underneath sat a small table with notepads, pens, and lotion. More messages were added, and soon a rainbow of florescent pinks, yellows, greens, and blues dotted the red background:

“You are beautiful for you are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

“Good News: Nothing Lasts Forever. Push On!”

“Don’t let negative things get to you.”

“Love yourself!”
A few days later, we began to share photos of these moments on Facebook, Twitter, and via email. That same day, I received a phone call from a KTUL Channel 8 reporter, Ryan Braschler, who wanted to do a story on the bathroom. He arrived right at the end of the school day and published the story for that evening’s news. Here’s a link to the video.
It was so exciting to the momentum building as people from inside and outside our community celebrated these little acts of kindness.
Good Deeds & Class Cup
I don’t believe these acts are an accident or an isolated incident as we do school. Last semester our student council began a campaign called the Class Cup Challenge (see PMP:038 Celebrating Good Deeds with Class Cup for more information). Throughout the semester, teachers submitted student names for good deeds observed. For instance, one teacher gave kudos to a boy who went out of his way to pick up someone else’s trash left on a table after breakfast. Another student was tagged for helping tutor another student.
As this practice as become contagious, our student council members meet and make award certificates for good deed recipients. These are delivered during classes so students can be acknowledged in front of their peers. Since Christmas Break,
22 min