The Assistant Principal Podcast

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: [email protected]

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

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

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

We assume that being an educational leader revolves around making deposits. What I mean is that we invest our time supporting and growing others. When we help others, we are, usually, making deposits. There will come a time however, when we need to make a withdrawal – when we need to have someone do something they don’t want to do or have a conversation they don’t want to have. This pattern of making deposits and withdrawals applies to our interactions with parents, students, teachers, and likely other leaders. I’m getting ahead of myself because the actual topic of today’s show is supporting teachers in their 3-5 years. However, the theme that will emerge, is about banking.

Notable Quotes

Lisa Parry:

“There is a lot school leaders can do to sand the rough edges of life for students and teachers” 

“It’s really hard to make a fundamental change… its way easier to take something that is a habit and refine it.”

Frederick:

So many gold nuggets today; apply to AP’s work with teachers, but also to our own work; consider holding onto one these:

1.     Four career stages

2.     Incremental changes add up (e.g. 11-second pause)

3.     Deposits before withdrawals

4.     It’s not about us! + we fill in the blanks – usually wrongly and based on how we see the world.

5.     Working with teachers: blank to coloring book.

Lisa Parry  Links:

Email:  [email protected]

Website: www.principalparry.com

Linked In:  www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-parry-pk-12leader/

Frederick’s Links:

Email: [email protected]

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

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

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

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

Today’s shout out goes to the instructional coaches of Lexington 4 school district in Gaston, SC. Emily, Mary Beth, Kari, Katie, and Amanda, I appreciate you taking time to give me critical feedback on the virtual leadership courses we’ve been talking about and helping me understand micro-credentials. The great thing about education is how willing people are to share their time and expertise – Thank you!

Today’s episode of Five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of August 28-Sept. 1, 2023. 

A horse story and the three options for change:

1. Go back
2. Press on
3. Adjust course

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:

1. 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.
2. 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 https://www.frederickbuskey.com/

I look forward to seeing you again next Tuesday for my discussion with Lisa Parry, a principal of a K-12 school in rural South Dakota. Lisa works with the state’s support program for teachers in years 3-5 and we discussed what APs could to help those teachers grow. 

Tune in on Tuesday for a great episode.

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: [email protected]

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

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

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

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 cha...

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!

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Takeaway

1.     Relationships exist in two basic spheres

2.     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

3.     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. 

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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: [email protected]

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

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

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

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:

1.     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. 

2.     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.

3.     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 ...

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:

1.     Invest no money but a little time and download our free checklist on building your support network.

2.     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.

3.     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. 

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: [email protected]

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

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

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

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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

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

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

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: [email protected]

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

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

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

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.