The Assistant Principal Podcast

Assistant Principal Podcast Five for Friday Template

Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast. I’m your host this week, Mara Buskey and if you don’t already know me, I am the Inclusion Strategist with Strategic Leadership Consulting, as well as Frederick’s daughter. 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 October 24th-28th, 2022. If you already get our daily leadership emails, then I hope you’ll find some added value here and if you don’t already subscribe you can find a link on our homepage at frederickbuskey.com. Many readers like to begin their mornings by reading the email and setting a leadership intention for the day, but please don’t feel any pressure to subscribe. You are already doing more to grow yourself than many others out there, simply by listening to the podcast.

So let’s recap. As you may know, Frederick (or my dad) has been with my mom in Kenya for the last two weeks so I had the opportunity to fill in for a week and write all the daily emails. I started off every email this week reminding our readers that these come from the perspective of me, a 23-year-old who is still very much working on her own leadership. I also ask them: What can you learn about empowering young people after reading this week’s messages? 

Monday: 

On Monday I wrote about my experience with Julia Cameron’s 12-week course, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. The MVP to this was “Five minutes can alter the direction of your day.” The book really changed the ways in which I talk to myself and helped engrain some positive habits. One of those habits is morning pages. 

Essentially, before doing anything else after waking up (except making coffee of course) you write three pages. You can write whatever you want, but the idea is to get all of your thoughts and worries out of your head so you can be less disrupted by them later. 

I challenged our readers for the remainder of the week to try writing morning pages. If 3 pages sounds scary, set your timer for five minutes. Write what you are feeling, what you’re dreading, or maybe what you need to do that day. Get out all your worries or thoughts that take up your space and energy. 

And after you do it, ask yourself if you feel any different? Is your mind quieter? Is your jaw less clenched or your breathing a little deeper?

Though I know writing down your stressors or spiraling thoughts first thing in the morning won’t make them disappear, spending any amount of time with them means they exist somewhere other than inside your mind. Maybe they are a little less powerful now. 

Tuesday

Tuesday was all about saying “yes” to what’s right inside you. Have you ever recognized how you were feeling and intellectualized it or explained away the emotions? Have you ever said to yourself, “I shouldn’t feel this way because …”?

When we dismiss our feelings, we invalidate ourselves. We lie to ourselves and we send the message that our emotions aren’t important. 

Rather than dismissing or making excuses, just say “yes.” Say yes to the anger, the sadness, the overwhelm, guilt and grief, to fatigue, to resentment… Say yes to joy, to love, to gratitude and pride. Say yes to not wanting to feel it. Say yes to feeling uncomfortable.

Acceptance is harder than we give credit for. Accepting your feelings is accepting yourself. Accepting yourself leads to a better and truer you. And a better you means you can support and lead your people with empathy and honesty. 

Wednesday

Okay, to slightly lighten things up, Wednesday I wrote about a joke I initially made.  I was having a hard time and I said to my partner, “nothing’s wrong but it sure ain’t right.” I laughed and then sat for a second and realized how true that statement felt. 

Startup company:

• Great vision that could make real change in our communities… but it just doesn’t feel right. 
• Gave myself 6 months
• So what do I do? I’m trusting myself. I’m diving inward, reflecting on what I’m feeling, and trusting those emotions and feelings. 
• 
  
• When you notice something is off, do you ignore it or trust your intuition?

Thursday I talk about the stories we tell ourselves. Oftentimes, the stories are how we think things “should be.”

For example: The last few months I’ve been talking quite negatively to myself because I didn’t go to grad school right away. My thought process is that Because I haven't gone to graduate school yet, I’m lazy. Laziness is wrong. I’m wrong. 

The truth is, going to grad school doesn't dictate if I’m wrong, lazy, or ultimately worthy. 

But the other truth to this is if I didn’t address these stories or take time to notice they are even there, how will I know they aren’t true?

What are the stories you tell yourself? Do they actually help you? Just because you think or feel something doesn't mean it’s true. 

Friday I discussed my desire for 6 months now to bake a cake after moving to Greensboro, NC in May. But until last week, I still had yet to bake anything. 

Long story short, I was telling myself there wasn’t enough time, and that baking a cake wasn’t as important as all the other things on my to do list. When I dug a little deeper, I realized that it wasn’t necessarily the baking that I was so caught up on, it was what it represented: time, balance, abundance, success.

I decided enough was enough. I was going to bake something. I made some pumpkin spice muffins and I shared them with my friends. It made me so happy that I did it again the next day. I realized it really didn't take that much time and it brought me so much joy. It turned my week around.  

This weekend, I urge you to forget the to-do list for just a moment. Think about something small that you’ve been wanting to do but convinced yourself there is not enough time. Go do it. 

Takeaway

I think the big takeaway to all of these is to listen to yourself and trust yourself. There is so much happening in the world, and I think my generation, or at least a lot of the young people I talk to, are questioning the world, themselves, and our priorities. We aren’t finding value and purpose in living that “American dream” that we have been fed our whole lives. I think we’ve also realized over the last few years that if we aren’t taking care of ourselves, we can’t take care of others. I don’t know. Maybe all generations have thought this way. Let me know how you feel, you can find my email in the show notes. 

This wraps up this week’s Five for Friday rendition of The Assistant Principal Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s show, please subscribe and rate this podcast. Rating the podcast really does help other people to find it.

I’m always trying to improve the show, so if you have feedback please email me at [email protected]. If you’d like to find out more about what we’re doing to support assistant principals, you can head over to the website at frederi...

Assistant Principal Podcast Content Episode Outline

Show title and release date: October 25, 2022

Show Description:

Every teacher should have a procedure for beginning class. Most opening class procedures share some common elements:·      What to do with materials·      How or when to sit down·      Getting started on bell work or an activator I’ve been teaching procedures for about twenty years, but this summer I made one small tweak in my format that promises to pay big dividends.

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. 

Today’s episode focuses on the importance of identifying clear goals for our procedures, but before we go any further, I want to remind you about our free micro-journal, Quadrant2. Issues of Quadrant2 come out once every 3-4 weeks. The five-page issues take a deeper look at topics that we address on the podcast. For example, last week we released Issue 2 which focused on how to implement the four patterns of observation in your school. Each issue includes nuts and bolts of implementation, discussion questions for your team, and even a section on how to apply the techniques if you are working in isolation. You can find a subscription link on my website at https://www.frederickbuskey.com/quadrant2.html As a bonus, if you subscribe this week you’ll be able to download the first two issues of Quadrant2 so you won’t have missed any opportunities to learn and grow.

Celebrations:

My recent trip to Kenya. My biggest takeaway is how similar we all are. Our struggles are the same – raising families, pursuing our dreams, and contributing to our communities. We may look and sound different, and our families, dreams, and communities my take different forms, but we all want the same thing. In a time of divisiveness, in the world and here at home, it is worth remembering that people are people, and therefore deserving of respect. We need to treat each other based on our commonalities, not on how our political and social “leaders” tell us we should treat people from different parties, or states, or countries.

The Big Idea

·      We know the reasons why each procedure we teach is important, but by being more thoughtful – and explicit – about the goals we want to achieve, we can make small but powerful tweaks to our procedures. 

The Why

·      My passion for procedures:

o   OSU experience

o   Teaching experience

o   Coordinating entry-year teacher programs

o   How poor procedural classroom prevent leaders from growing teachers

·      Good procedures decrease discipline referrals. Even a one referral decrease in a week yields and average of five minutes per day that you can invest in growing teachers. That’s enough time to make a difference with a new, struggling, or even veteran teacher.

The what (MVP version)

 For years I have taught that a good procedure has five components:

1.     Title or name (may be an acronym)

2.     Steps (1-5)

3.     Key words for each step

4.     Acronym for the steps

5.     Graphic (necessity varies with age)

In prepping for a workshop with a middle school teaching staff in August, I realized that I should be better about emphasizing the why – the goals of a procedure.

I began by looking at a sample routine for entering class. The procedure had four parts – Sit, Arrange your stuff, write based on a prompt, and stand when finished. I called it SAWS:

·      Sit

·      Arrange

·      Write

·      Stand

The goals of a beginning class procedure are obvious: it saves time. If we can get started in 60 seconds instead of 180 seconds, we can save 300+ minutes over the course of a school year. That’s over a week of class time!

But as I began writing down this goal, others naturally appeared. Before I go further, I’m going to give you ten seconds of silence to think about the goals of a good beginning class routine. Besides saving time, what else should the procedure achieve?

Here’s what I came up with:

·      Connect with teacher

·      Maximize learning time

·      Minimize distractions and misbehaviors

·      Empower students to be responsible for their own learning

·      Focus students on learning

·      Begin anticipatory set (optional)

What I was most excited about was that first goal – connecting with the teacher. Sure, the teacher can check in with the students, but what if a part of the procedure directed the students to check in with the teacher? What if every class began with every student making some kind of contact with the teacher? How cool would that be? How humanizing could it be?

Most teachers have one or more students that need that connection, and for whom the teacher should know the student’s emotional state. Making a small tweak to an opening class procedure creates an opportunity for that.

And so, I added a step to my sample procedure. The first thing students do is to say hello to the teacher. What hello looks like will vary with the teacher and the students, but here are some options:

·      Actually say hello

·      Give a fist bump

·      Or a thumb’s up

·      Or share one thing that happened in the past 24 hours

·      Or flash a number of fingers to indicate their emotional strength, for example one for terrible, need to talk, up to five for excellent.

Maybe I’m being silly here, maybe most teachers already do this – but if they do, I haven’t seen it. So I’m going to hold onto this as being a good idea.

Here’s what I’d like you to take away from this episode:

1.     Think about the multiple goals and opportunities that exist within each procedure.

2.     Begin observing procedures at work in classrooms and challenge yourself to find opportunities to achieve more with any given procedure.

3.     Engage your teachers in informal discussions. Tell them you’ve been doing some PD on procedures that has made you think about their goals. Review a procedure with the teacher and work together to identify explicit goals.

Challenges

As always, the challenge in following up on this idea is priority management. Without being intentional and prioritizing teacher development, you’ll get too busy to follow up. Try taking time during the first hour of the day to check in on some teachers’ beginning class procedures and have a brief conversation after the kids have left the building but...

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 October 22-28, 2022. If you already get my daily leadership emails, then I hope you’ll find some added value here and if you don’t already subscribe you can find a link on my home page at frederickbuskey.com. Many readers like to begin their mornings by reading the email and setting a leadership intention for the day, but please don’t feel any pressure to subscribe. You are already doing more to grow yourself than many others out there, simply by listening to the podcast.

Show Notes, Episode 67: Blooming Where You Are Planted with Robyn Jackon

About this show: 

“As an assistant principal, you must learn to bloom where you are planted. If you do, you will open up huge opportunities to make a meaningful difference right now in your career and build the skills you need to make an even greater difference once you become a principal.”
These aren’t my wise words. They were first spoken by Dr. Robyn Jackson, addressing a common concern of assistant principals: How do you grow your own leadership in the shadow, or at least presence, of another leader?

Notable Quotes

Robyn Jackson

“But when you're a builder, nobody has to move because you can build wherever you are. And so I think that's kind of one of the main differences between leadership and builderdership that creates space for other people.” 2:40

“Because then you build the muscles of of of truly being the person who is the builder in the building, that you know the builder in chief in your school building. And those skills transfer over to the principal ship when most of the other skills we learned as an AP don't transfer” 10:45

“He said something that just stopped me in my tracks and I couldn't stop thinking about, which is he said bosses say go and leaders say let's go. And I've heard that before. That's, you know, that's a great distinction. But then he said builders. Say come and and in that one simple sentence, I'd started to to to see the answer to some of the problems that I've been frustrated about in education” 14:20

“And how do you get your people committed to that compelling purpose? And therefore things you're going to do, feedback, support, accountability and culture. That's the only four things you can do to positively influence your teacher's behaviors.” 16:27

“Then your conversations, whether they're formal or informal, become more about teacher growth and serving students than they do about fulfilling the requirements of the evaluation cycle. And so you don't have to straddle 2 worlds anymore. You turn the thing that you have to do into the thing that you want to do anyway, so that you're always every conversation helping teachers grow” 24:27

“ You have to sell things to the district, the idea about why we're going to do something or not doing, or you have to sell the idea to parents or to your community. We need to get good at selling our ideas, and the assistant principal is the assistant principal. Ship is a great way to practice that, you know, how do you see something that needs work in the school, and how do you, how do you present that idea to a principal in a way that the principal sees not only the merit and the idea, but is willing to take the risk of implementing your idea” 30:50

“If you can take yourself out of the hero spot, let them be the hero, and you put yourself in the guide position. You will always, always be able to get your story across in the way, or get your advice or your ideas across in a way that people can welcome them.” 35:54

“You owe it to yourself. You owe it to us. You owe it to the students and the families you serve. To instead of trying to be some cookie cutter version of of what somebody else's idea of an administrator is. To be yourself, but not just yourself, your best self, that's that's the, that's the ultimate role” 39:30

“Focus on being your best self, because if you can do that, you can really step into that the role will be the right role will be waiting for you” 41:00

“it's not just grow where you're planted, bloom where your planet. It does two things. First of all, it makes your work so much more fulfilling and rewarding right now. Secondly, it does change people's lives for the better. But thirdly, this is almost counterintuitive. By blooming where you're planted, you get more recognition than if you try to conform into what the district wants you to be anyway, because there's only one of you.” 42:54

Frederick

“One of the best principles I know. Doesn't respond email You know, there are a few, but if you want to get in touch with him, emails not the way, because he doesn't do email, because he's out in classrooms working with teachers. So it's interesting that people, I think. If you're doing it right and executing on that vision and making a case for that, there's, I think we get more latitude than than what we think we can get.” 29:47

“We make a lot of assumptions about the systems we're in and what the systems want from us. And I think in your story what you show us is a lot of times our assumptions aren't correct” 47:43

Links:

School Leadership Reimagined: https://schoolleadershipreimagined.com

Buildership University: https://buildershipuniversity.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)

 2022-10-21_68_Five for Friday Final Audio Hello colleagues and welcome to the Assistant Principal Podcast I'm your host, Frederick Busky. The goal of this podcast is to improve life and leadership for assistant principals. Today's episode of five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of October seventeenth through twenty first. With a caveat. Although we did indeed publish these emails this week, they are actually repeats from our list of greatest hits. This week as well as next week, I am in Kenya and so we just thought that this would be a fun way to kind of cover our bases, but also still continue to provide you some value while I'm away playing and learning and being in schools in Kenya. So I hope you enjoy this recap. The topic of Monday's message was leadership, isolation, and I hope you're subscribing to the daily list because one of my all time favorite photographs was included as part of this daily email and it is a black and white photo of somebody standing in a puddle with a box over their head. When I first saw this photo, it just made me think of the isolation and the loneliness that can come with leadership. I didn't really go into anything in the email that talked about how to break that, break that isolation down, but I just asked readers to come sit with that and think about their own feelings. Think about how you can take care of yourself. And break down some of that isolation. You see things and you say why, but I dream things that never were, and I say why not? That quotes from George Bernard Shaw in 1949 and the topic of Tuesday's email is vision. I thought this was a nice juxtaposition from Monday's email of a leader with a box over their head. I have to admit that I have a love hate relationship with vision. I used to believe very strongly and passionately that it was a leader's job to provide vision. And then I had a leader that came into my organization and completely trashed it. In my mind he trashed it and he had his own vision. And despite there being lots of people that had invested many years in the organization, he came in from the outside and just imposed his vision over everything. And that constituted a lot of destruction of programs and really damaging people. So I've become. Kind of very skeptical about the idea that leaders come in and impose a vision from outside. I think what we need to be focusing more on is the development of shared vision. And when we talk about visionary leadership, I think what we really should be talking about is the expectation that leaders can come in and create space for people to talk about their own dreams and goals and aspirations, and that leaders can facilitate a group of people sharing that and finding the commonality and developing a vision that is common to the participants. The people within the organization and that then the leader can really give voice to that and help keep people focused on that vision. Speaking of vision, Wednesday's email was about the difference between Mission, vision and goals, and I told the story of a trip that Pam and I took in the summer of 20. 21 So Pam is my wife, the other doctor Buskey. And in the summer of 2021 we jumped in an SUV and drove across country visiting all kinds of parks and things. And so I used that trip to talk about the mission, which the mission was to reconnect with family and friends and to have memorable experiences in nature. That's what we were going out to do. Vision is about the outcome resulting from enacting or fulfilling your mission. So our goal was to reconnect with family that were, excuse me, our mission was to reconnect with family and have memorable experiences. The vision was that we would drive home renewed in multiple ways, with a new set of memories and a great appreciation for our country, its people, and its beauty. Now, goals are the achievements that will help you fulfill your mission. So for our trip, some of our goals were backpack in the Badlands Backpacking Glacier Park, visit my friend Nat and Klamath Falls, spend time with my mom in San Francisco, and visit other family on the way home. Now, as it turned out, we did not meet all those goals. Yet we still achieved the mission and we still fulfilled our vision. So remember, the goals were places we would visit and things we would do. The mission was to reconnect with family and have memorable experiences, and the vision was that those experiences would leave us renewed and connected when we got home. So how could we achieve the mission and the vision if we didn't achieve the goals? Well, what happened was the summer of 2021 there was a massive heat wave across the northwest. And so some of the things that we wanted to do we just, we got cooked out of and so we had to change our plans. So we wound up not backpacking in the Badlands and we didn't backpack in Glacier Park. But that's OK, because one of the things that we sometimes do is we get so focused on goals that we forget why we have the goals, right? The goals are just kind of measurement steps on the way to achieving the mission and the vision. And there are a lot of times when the goals stop making sense for whatever reason. So when you're thinking about your organization and the mission and the vision and goals, yes, you want to attend to the goals, but don't get too focused on the goals. Always check and make sure that you're actually making progress on the mission. Because that's the most important thing. The title of Thursday's email was are you a force multiplier? And this email was inspired by something my good friend and colleague Doctor Robert Maddox sent me about the human touch and the human touch as being a force multiplier. The idea here is that connecting with people builds community, and that community creates strength, resilience and hope. So I offered three things that people could do. Each one of those would take less than three minutes and challenged readers to execute on one of these things to create connectivity and build community and thereby be a force multiplier because leaders are force multipliers. So the first thing was to me, call or email someone that you worked with this week and express gratitude. The second thing was to get together with another leader and identify a strategic behavior that you can implement next week. For example, engaging in five minute coaching and commit to being each other's accountability partners in executing that strategy. And the third one was a little bit selfish. I encouraged people to email me with an example of how something this week helped you to help someone else or a topic that you'd like me to write about in the future. And I do hope, if you are on the email list and you got this email on thursday, I hope you acted. I hope you took that opportunity to be intentional and to do something to reach out and create connectivity and build community with someone, whether that's me or somebody else. And if you're not on the email list and you're hearing this now on a Friday afternoon or maybe a Saturday. I encourage you to challenge yourself me call or email someone you worked with this week and just express gratitude. Work with another leader and think about a strategy that you could use next week to build community, build connection with people, and then hold each other accountable for doing it or. When you're done with this podcast, go ahead and email me and tell me something about this past week that you did to help someone else or send me a topic that you'd like me to write about. And finally, on Friday, we revisited the idea of m - V divided by E motivation equals value divided by effort. There was a graphic included in that you could print out and put up by your computer or on a wall somewhere. I just think M - V divided by E is so powerful. I won't elaborate on it hugely, but the idea is that increased value, decreased effort leads to increased motivation. And if we want people to be more m...

Show Notes, Episode 63: Productive Disruption with Dr. Mary Hemphill

About this show: 

Ship is sinking (may 26, 2022, Ep 28)The teacher shortage is not going awayThe academic setbacks from COVID will ripple through our schools for ten yearsContinued trauma has exacerbated already challenging mental health issues among our students, their families, and even our teachers.Politics – enough said.
The only thing that’s constant is change. Organizations have this strange property in which they are always changing and yet always resisting change. The past two school years have created stress, loss, and incredible turmoil. They have also created an opportunity. Let’s be real:
The new normal is abnormal and our old systems aren’t working anymore. Instead of mourning and lamenting, what if we embraced this moment? What if we continued the work of dismantling and then rebuilding what school looks like? The last big wave of educational reform was the standards movement of the 1980’s. Like so many reforms, the promises have not been kept. So, what’s possible? What’s next? What can we do?

Notable Quotes

Guest

Instead of lamenting and mourning what we've lost, I'm wondering, can we embrace this moment?

over 54 % of today's professionals over the past two years have heightened anxiety, heightened burnout, heightened isolation and heightened loneliness

we're incubating great human beings and bringing resources that we've never thought about before into the school building. It's assessing our mental health resources. It's asking questions about support instead of asking teachers. Hey, are you OK? Saying, have you taken time to rest and recenter today

Are you scheduling yourself? And they're like, what do you mean by that? I said, well, you put your board meetings on there, you put your back to school meetings, your open houses. You put all of those things on there. Are you scheduling you?

So when you explore your inner territory as a leader, yes, you're going to uncover things. No, it's not always going to be in a nice, pretty package, but maybe what you uncover, whether it's in your research, whether it's in your reflection. Whether you simply do a staycation and, you know, tell your family, hey, listen, I have to invest in myself. But if you don't invest in yourself in the beginning, you can't reap the reward later.

 I talk a lot about nomenclature and the way that we call out certain things. So for instance, self-care has absolutely, positively become a buzzword.

Self-awareness is literally asking the questions to say, OK, what kind of leader do I want to be in my personal and professional life? And then taking time to answer that question.

I'm a human being and not a human doing.

You are the leader. You're not the assistant follower. You're the assistant principal.

 I always tell leaders that 60 % of what we do moving forward should be people centered, 40 % business center. And I think that that percentage is going to allow us to bring our students, bring our teachers, bring our community with us rather than leave them at the precipice of what's happening in education imagine.

 We're big people, inspiring little people to be able to do life well. Life looks different, so we have to employ different resources and different strategies.
We need to come together more in the school community than we are polarizing one another.

When we talk about disruption, we have to remember that this is not going to look the way that it used to.

Have the courage to take time to spend with yourself. Put yourself on your calendar.

This is not about twenty-first century leadership. This is about the impact that your leadership in the twenty first century is going to make in the twenty second century.

Frederick

People are realizing that the old ways are absolutely not going to fit into the boxes. Let's just take the box out for recycling. The box is gone

I'm still hearing about driving new curricula and introducing new, new teaching things. And just bringing all this stuff onto teachers who are just trying to survive. And I think we do need to really move from what we think our teachers need to, building those relationships, focusing on those relationships and through that understanding, having our teachers tell us what they need.

There's a really consistent theme, and that theme is that change begins within ourselves. 

we have to shift from being task focused to people focused

 Coming into this school and me seeing who you are before I see what you are. And again going back to that task focus when we're task focused. And when we're prioritizing time, we're focused on what you are. Because understanding who you are. That that takes a different, you know, I've got to be present for that. I can't be worried about those other things. My priority has to be you.

the common thread that works through all those leaders that we've talked to that have inspired us. Is an they know who they are. And they're authentic about who they are.

Having the courage to take care of yourself. I think it's harder than having the courage to take care of other people.

Links:

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)

2022-09-27_62_Five for Friday_FINAL AUDIO

 00:01 

Hello colleagues, and welcome to the Assistant Principal podcast. I'm your host, Frederick Buskey. The goal of this podcast is to improve life and leadership for assistant principals. Today's episode of five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of September twenty sixth through thirtieth twenty twenty two. If you already get my daily emails, then I hope you'll find some added value here. And if you don't already subscribe, you can find a link on my homepage at Frederick Buskey com.

 00:32 

Many readers like to begin their mornings by reading the email and setting a leadership intention for the day, but please don't feel any pressure to subscribe. You're already doing more to grow yourself than many others out there simply by listening to the podcast. For the next two weeks. We're writing about the same theme each day, and that theme is why people don't do what we want them to do. I began the week on Monday by telling a story that's adopted from real life about a state that is requiring all elementary teachers to be trained in an intensive science based that's is that air quotes science based reading technique and structure their lessons in a specific format defined by the program.

 01:26 

We'll be really creative and we'll call it letters. Letters So the training requires teachers to spend 2 to 3 hours a week outside of the school day. As compensation, the state is providing a monthly stipend of 200$ and while some teachers are embracing the program predictably, many are not. I closed Monday by talking about. The incredible formula of m - V divided by East, which is motivation equals value divided by effort. What I love about this formula is that it suggests that there is no such thing as laziness, and there's no such thing as somebody being unmotivated or not caring. Motivation is simply an outcome of the formula, the value divided by the effort.

 02:30 

So the higher the value and the lower the effort, the more motivated I'm going to be. The lower the value, and the higher the effort, the less motivated I'll be. I love this formula because it stops us from judging people, and it gets us to put on problem solver hats instead of blame hats. So just keep this in mind as we work through the next, I guess, eight nine days M equals V divided by E What's the value that somebody's seeing, and what's the effort it's requiring? Two stays, really a cautionary tale, and I told a story of a new principle that I had been working with a couple years ago, and I kept emailing them and didn't get anything, didn't get anything.

 03:22 

I had met them just briefly at the beginning of the year. Finally I talked to one of the other principals and said, hey, will you have them contact me? They emailed me and said, oh, I'm sorry I wasn't getting your emails, they were going to my spam. So we set up a time for a coaching call. And they couldn't make it and they couldn't make the next one, and they couldn't make the next one. And I was trying to figure this out and I made U this whole narrative to myself about the principle not valuing me and not wanting my coaching services and yeah, that's fine, that's fine.

 04:01 

But I had this whole narrative put together. Finally we got together and the principal came up to me and grabbed my hand and said, ah, I'm so thankful that we finally got together. I've heard so many great things about you and I have been wanting to work with you all year. And I just had to sit back and think about. In the absence of the information about why they really were so busy, I just made-up a story. And that story really was based on my own insecurities and my own experiences and sometimes neighbors negative perspectives.

 04:41 

And to the point of Tuesday's message is to help us remember that in the absence of information, a lot of times we just make stuff up and we make stuff up based on our prior experiences and our own insecurities. So that's something that we need to be really cautious of. So the first real reason that we cover about why people don't do the things we want them to do, and I guess I should have said this doesn't just have to be some big change mandate that's coming from above. This can be something like implementing a teaching strategy or following through on turning in grades in a timely manner. There are all kinds of places that this could apply.

 05:27 

So the first real reason that we look at is that. As a person that's been asked to do something, our past experiences colors our predictions for the future. If I've already been through training on a science based reading program. And it was a horrible experience. I may assume that letters is also going to be a horrible experience. And because of that negative. History I'm going to dodge out of doing it because the effort, the emotional angst and what I perceive to be the difficulty level is going to be so high that there's no way that it's worth the value. The next reason we covered on Thursday was that people may not actually have the skills that we assume they have.

 06:30 

Maybe a teacher is resisting the letters program because the content is way over their head. Maybe they started the program but got a couple hours in and. Just couldn't figure it out. Maybe they didn't have the prerequisite skills to make the program work. We might reasonably assume that an elementary school teacher would have received substantial training in reading and in literacy. But a lot of times that's not true, because we might also assume that all our new teachers have been taught how to manage classrooms, and that's not true.

 07:10 

So it's important for us to think and realize sometimes people just don't have the skills we assume they have, which of course increases effort greatly. On Friday, we looked at confusing self preservation for apathy. Let's think about a new teacher whose year is off to a difficult start. They have a difficult group of students. They don't have that background in classroom management, and they've got this huge curriculum. They're in elementary school, so they've got five different subjects to learn to teach. And now, on top of all of that, they have to do the letters program.

 07:53 

They're just trying to survive. They're just trying to survive in the classroom each day to pile on this additional burden or this additional program. Sorry, I shouldn't say burden to pile on this additional program. It's just going to collapse them. And so they don't do it. They pull back because they're just trying to survive. It's not apathy. Ok. That wraps up the first section the first week of this and we'll continue these next week. And I'm not going to do a big takeaway here except that. What we need to do when people aren't doing what we want them to do, the first thing we need to do is really pause and ask why and not jump to any conclusions.

 08:45 

And maybe that why needs to begin with a conversation with them, not an accusation, not. An aggressive kind of conversation, but just saying hey. We're supposed to be doing this right now. I notice this isn't happening. Let's talk about this. What's going on why? Also, before you go, I want to remind you that we're running a special for about 24 more hours on our apex community. If you listen to Tuesday's podcast, you hea...

Show Description:

How did your to-do list go today?How about yesterday?How will it go tomorrow?If you missed last week’s webinar on escaping the black hole of urgency, you may still be focused on the to-do list. I won’t recap the entire webinar here, but I will pull a couple of highlights.

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 another content-focused episode. I know it has been a few weeks since our last interview, but if you can hold on for one more week, you’ll be able to tune in to my discussion with the incomparable Dr. Mary Hemphill.

Celebrations:

That we all have opportunities to reflect and refocus. Just because we are struggling doesn’t mean we have to stay there, and so often our struggles as leaders are more about our own self-doubt or the flawed perspectives, we have adopted than about the actual work itself. 

So, I am celebrating that I have been able to reflect and refocus and I breathing a bit easier. I hope you also find the opportunity to this if it is something you need right now.

Body

We can’t escape the black hole of urgency by using time management because time is not the problem. I’m not going to lay out everything that spells out what the real problem is, that’s why I did the webinar. However, I will share the three epiphanies that have helped me reshape the way I work and what I focus on.

Two responsibilities of administrators:

·      Keep everyone safe

·      Grow your teachers

Story with the principal

The three epiphanies

Emphasize priorities and values

Examples:

·      PPT over coaching

·      Adding clipart to a newsletter 

·      Car line v. new teacher

Think about what you are doing v not doing and ask:

·      Are the things I value most getting done?

·      Are the most important things getting done?

·      How do what’s important and my own values as a leader intersect?

Summarizing (The big takeaway)

Repeat the three epiphanies

These aren’t about time management, but by keeping them close. Maybe you can focus more of your time doing what’s most important.

I mentioned the webinar. It was a fun time I participants walked away with a better understanding of the real problem, a change in perspective, five tips for being strategically reactive, and three strategies for being proactive that could be enacted in five minutes or less.

The replay is available as a courtesy to APEx Community members. APEx stand for …

My goals in developing APEx Community were two-fold:

·      Improve mental and emotional health of APs and other school leaders by building a community that decreases isolation, develops a network of support, and provides a place for colleagues to collaborate and share in solving real-world problems.

·      Create a place to provide community-driven professional development to help leaders excel at the jobs they have now while also preparing for the jobs they may want or have later.

·      If you are interested in joining our APEx Community, you can learn more at frederickbuskey.com/APExlaunchlive

·      For podcast listeners I am running a five-day special. If you use the code “3epiphanies” on check out you will receive two months for the price of one. You can sign up here.This special expires Saturday at midnight, so if you’ve been interested in joining APEx Community but not quite sure, this is the perfect time. You’ll be able to connect with colleagues from different states and different types of schools, and if you join by Thursday you’ll be able to sign up for our group coaching session on Thursday, Sept 29 at 3:30 EDT. I would love for you to join our community, but this offer expires Saturday night.https://www.frederickbuskey.com/apexlaunchlive.html,  hit the join now link, use 3 epiphanies when you check out. It’s $49/month but you will get a two months for that proce, immediate access to the community, group coaching, and the webinar replay.

Show Outro

That wraps up today’s content focused episode. We’ll be back next week with [guest] in an episode titled [title]. 

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/theassistantprincipal.

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