The Assistant Principal Podcast

 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: [email protected] 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 

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 November 21-25, 2022. 

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/

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 [email protected]. 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. 

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 November 14-18, 2022. 

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 

 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 gr...

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 [email protected]

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.

You can ask questions, make requests and give us feedback at [email protected]. If you’d like more content tailored towards the needs of assistant principals, you can head over to my website at frederickbuskey.com.

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

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: [email protected] 

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)