The Assistant Principal Podcast

Show Notes, Episode 31: Prioritizing Your Own Leadership Development with Maria Werner

About this show:

Dealing with discipline, being the test coordinator, and taking care of a million things for everyone else. Somehow you find the time. But do you find – or make – that time for yourself? What are your strategies for nurturing your own growth? Today, Maria Werner talks with us about how she juggles school, kids, and even dogs, and manages to still prioritize her own growth. We also discuss how Maria has grown her leadership through APEx and some of her key takeaways. 

Notable Quotes

Maria Werner:

“I think that the beauty of education is that there is always opportunity to grow”

“Stay in the now. I think that’s been a big piece of the puzzle”

“My drive time is my reflection time… If I didn’t have it, I would feel like there was something missing… A lot of my management comes just that thought process”

“First year is not meant to make waves, just ripples”

“I have found that the way to gain buy in is, instead of delivering the message, it is engulfing them in it, making it interactive, so that they can see, first-hand, that it works”

“Collaboration and mentorship are two of my biggest things that I rank the highest in my professional values and APEx covers both of those”

“I don’t have an opportunity to collaborate or talk with other people that are serving in the same role that I am, so that collaborative piece is a big part of my love for APEx”

“The one-on-one coaching that you have been able to provide me, I can’t put a dollar amount on that. You take me for who I am, and you know what I bring to the table, highlighting strengths and then pointing out where I could focus my improvement”

“The figures and visual representations that you provide are directly what works for me. They are small, incremental things that I can see in my mind in the times that I am reflecting”

“Delegate, delegate, delegate.”

“Find those people in your building that are aspiring leaders and don’t be afraid to delegate those out.”

“Any experience was one of value to me.”

“Motivation equals value over effort is something in every instructional work team meeting, I brought up because in this COVID time and state of education as a whole, teacher motivation was lacking. 

“What do we value as educators? What does each teacher value in their role? And how can I as the leader minimize the effort it takes for them to accomplish that goal?... and then that motivation just… you can see it.”

“That formula is something that I took back immediately and is actionable in all entities in our operations of our school building.”

“Honing in on how a 5-minute experience with a teacher can have such a big impact and it only takes 5 minutes.”

“I knew about APEx, I knew it was directly for assistant principals. So I went to the website, gathered as much as I could of giving that overview of what I would get from the experience and shared that with my principal who then requested the funds for the use of being part of the APEx program.”

“Who do you collaborate with regularly and if you feel like you don’t have those people that pop into your mind immediately, try to build that because the collaboration piece has been some of the best professional growth that I have received.”

“We are your mentors? If you just think your principal, start broadening who else you could be reaching out to and who else would be willing to mentor you. And then who do you mentor? Because it’s a pipeline.”

Frederick: 

“That growth mindset starts with us, it starts with administrators”

“If we are going, going, going, and we never create that space [for reflection], then that stuff is just flying around our brains all the time”

”We don’t manage time, we manage priorities”

“A lot of people say ‘I want to be more balanced in my life’. There was one time when I really had achieved balance between family, and profession, and social life, And you know what, I was mediocre at everything”

“I have moved from the model of balance to juggling, because when you’re juggling you get one thing up in the air, then you forget about it for a minute while you go to the next thing, and you are 100% focused on that one thing. And I think that is more the path to happiness and satisfaction because none of us want to be mediocre all the time”

“Get away from the idea of balancing time, get away from the idea of managing time, manage your priorities and then juggle so that you are 100% focused in the moment”

“This fall in APEx we are really going to double down on the instructional leadership piece”

“We don’t have enough time, we don’t have enough money, but the other thing we don’t get enough of is attention. That’s what that 5-minute coaching does. It 100% of our presence as leaders with the people that we are serving.”

Summary of Peer coaching (from 30-minute mark):

·      SC requires a mid-year SLO (teacher evaluation component) conference.

·      Admin provided opportunity for teachers to do peer observations as part of the SLO process.

·      Admin determined who would visit who and neither teacher knew in advance.

·      Principal went with the teacher to do the peer observation.

·      AP covered class prior to arts block

·      Teacher returned to AP during arts block to debrief with AP.

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: https://www.frederickbuskey.com/the-assistant-principal.html

Blog: www.frederickbuskey.com/blog (reposts of the daily email)

Show Notes, Episode 30: Six Ways to Eliminate Interruptions

About this show:

In a noisy world, is it possible to find the quiet necessary to do work that moves us forward? In this episode, we cover six suggestions for creating a saner and more productive leadership life

Notable Quotes

Frederick: 

“I have been out of higher ed for three years now, and I had just forgotten how disruptive and really how grueling it is to be faced with those constant interruptions, and not just the notifications and things, but being pulled from one task to another”

“Turn off all email notifications on every single device that you have. Just turn it off, and never ever ever ever turn your email notifications on again. There is absolutely no reason.”

“Never use email as a synchronous form of communication… it is not designed to be used that way and if you don’t use it for synchronous communication then you don’t need to have your notifications on.”

“Identify 3-5 people and make sure their calls will always ring through, and then turn your phone on do not disturb”

“When everybody can get ahold of you, you can’t get ahold of your work.”

“When I create pockets of time where I can concentrate fully and not be distracted, I am going to be so much more efficient”

Six ways to eliminate interruptions:

1.     Turn off all email notifications

2.     Never use email for synchronous conversations 

3.     Create a google doc to share FYI information

4.     Identify 3-5 people who have to be able to get ahold of you, program them in your phone to always be able to ring through, and then turn your phone on do not disturb

5.     For every minute of the school day, have one individual that is on call and rotate who that individual is

6.     Educate all stakeholders as to what you’re doing

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)

Show Notes, Episode 29: Culture with Brad Coleman

About this show:

Culture. What is it? How do we shape it? Why is it so critical? You could fill an entire library with books related to culture and how leaders influence it. Or you could listen to this episode of The Assistant Principal Podcast with our special guest, Brad Coleman.

Notable Quotes

Brad Coleman:

“it’s okay to complain and be frustrated, but you need to come with some solutions as well”

“I tell our teachers, I tell our students, school is hard now, we have to find the good and celebrate it”

“I don’t care who you are, everyone likes to be acknowledged positively”

“When I take over a school, I flood it with acknowledgements and thank you’s… That’s how you change culture, with just little things like that”

“Our teachers, if you would ask them here, we treat them well. We take care of them, not just on teacher appreciation week… we take care of them every day. And if we do that for our teachers, we expect them to do the same thing for the students, and they do.”

“If the student struggles in reading, we know what to do; we have all of the data and all of the tools to teach the student how to read better. The behavior is the same, you have to re-teach those behaviors… we know consequences don’t change behavior. Relationships do, trust does, and that’s what we try to do”

3 things to build culture: “community, consistency, and positive acknowledgment”

“Leadership is in the details. I know we have to be really really big picture in the jobs that we do, but just like we ask our teachers to find the good in the classrooms and acknowledge the good, we’ve got to be very in tune to the details, because we can miss things very easily”

“Culture is hard to build it, but its easy to lose it if you don’t pay attention to the signs”

Frederick: 

“I’ve heard teachers so many times say ‘well I am not going to reward the kids for doing what they should do.’ Which is the complete opposite message of what you’re sending, which is ‘We definitely want to reward people for what they’re doing because that is how we reinforce that behavior and motivate people to keep going, especially when it gets hard”

“Sometimes teachers talk about discipline, but what they really want is retribution because they are angry and hurt”

“If we are going to remove a student from class, then we’re going to hold them accountable, but we are also going to be accountable for making the effort to make it right and get them back on track”

Links:

Brad’s email: [email protected]

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)

Show Notes, Episode 28: The Ship is Sinking

About this show:

Imagine you’re on a nice little boat, floating along a gentle river or out on a calm lake. Everything is fine until you hear a gurgling sound. You look down and are astounded to see water pouring in from a how in the bottom of the boat. You grab your red Solo cup and begin scooping out water, but it isn’t enough. You look around for something to patch the hole with – nothing. As you look around despondently, you notice a faded plastic bucket floating your way. You manage to get ahold of it and redouble your efforts. Aided by the size of the bucket you begin to get the boat emptied and over the next few hours you alternate between bailing and rowing. The shore is getting closer. You may make it.

Notable Quotes

Frederick: 

“The way a lot of states are responding to the teacher shortage is to lower the requirements for being a teacher. That is going to open it up to more people, but those people are going to come in facing increased challenges with even less preparation. So, we have to assume at this point that teachers coming to us are underprepared.”

“We have three holes: we’re losing teachers, kids are coming to us with incredible challenges, and the teachers we do have coming into the profession are underprepared.”

“Right now, we don’t do anything differently for early career teachers as we do for all of our other teachers. We don’t have anything set as a system that lets us really focus in and tactically and strategically work with those folks, and we can’t do that anymore. We need to structure things in our building to allow us as instructional leaders to really focus and lift up our early career teachers”

“I think it is time for us to think about [classroom] procedures as being something that is school-wide”

“Five aspects to this ‘plastic bucket’ that we need to pull out of the water:

1.     Stop doing what we’ve always been doing

2.     Change the structures in our building to help our instructional leadership team focus specifically on supporting early career teachers

3.     Streamline procedures so that everyone is using the same ones

4.     Be more directive in our coaching with early career teachers

5.     Move from the idea of just supporting first to third year teachers to supporting them in their whole early career, 3-5 years out”

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)

Show Notes, Episode 2: Why is Instructional Leadership so Hard?

About this show:

Have you noticed how many first-year teachers have trouble managing their classrooms? And if they never receive really good support, they become 5 and 10-year teachers who can’t manage their classrooms. And then they leave the profession.

But guess what? We have a similar problem in the principalship. Most (not all) principals are not fully prepared to meet the challenges of instructional leadership. And if they never get really good support, their trajectories can mirror that f the teachers I just mentioned.

This issue is the reason I started this podcast, the reason I do a daily leadership email, it is the focus of my trainings and courses, and it is at the heart of my APEx program. If you’ve been listening for a while, you know that instructional leadership is a common focus. Today, we are going to look at the problem of developing instructional leaders and some things I think we can do about it.

Notable Quotes

Frederick: 

“In a perfect organization, which does not exist, the people, the structures, and the resources are all aligned to the purpose, and to each other. And a perfectly aligned organization is a great place to work. Unfortunately, it is the nature of organizations to be in disalignment rather than alignment”

“You have two basic responsibilities… Your primary job is to keep everybody safe. Number two is to improve student learning and outcomes for students. Now, you don’t teach students, so the way that you do that is by growing your teachers. In other words, you have two responsibilities: keep everybody safe and help your teachers get better.”

“We can’t manage time, time is finite, there is only so much of it, there is nothing to manage. What we have to manage is priorities”

“Really good instructional leadership is also about systems alignment”

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)

Are you living your leadership journey courageously? Before Dr. Mary Hemphill became the Director of Academic Standards for the North Carolina Department of education she was a passionate and innovative principal. Before that, she was an assistant principal with the courage to stand up for her convictions. The assistant principalship is loaded with values conflicts. How do you stay true to your values amidst complex power dynamics and competing interests? Mary helps us figure it all out in this week’s episode.

Show Notes, Episode 25: Parents and Community

About this show:

“We need to increase family engagement.” I hear this all the time. We know what we want from families, but do we know what families want from us? Today’s episode will take us beyond reading rallies and pizza nights and even beyond my favorite parent event - donuts for dads. Today we focus on what teachers can do to build stronger parent partnerships and how school leaders can support those partnerships.

Notable Quotes

Dr. Leigh Ann Alford-Keith

“We need to be addressing power dynamics that are present in the ways that our schools are set up. When we focus on events and when we focus on what we can do for families instead of what families can do for us, we are perpetuating the typical power dynamics in a school and that excludes a lot of our diverse families”

“we want to provide culturally relevant instruction, but we don’t necessarily know about their cultures. And their families do know about their cultures, so if we engage their families as partners and there is information available to us, information that the family has about the way that their children learn or what is culturally important to them, that is not information we are able to have on our own”

“If we aren’t seeing families as partners, we are missing out on really important information that could help us better educate their children”

“We talk a lot about social emotional learning and the whole child, but the whole child includes the family”

“Research tells us that effective family engagement increases teachers’ efficacy and they feel that they are better able to do their jobs”

“Sometimes the parents come to us in a combative way because of their past experiences. Because they did not have the best experience in school, because they experienced being ostracized”

“Even teachers who would never say ‘those kids’ will say ‘those families’. In fact, there are interesting studies that indicate that teachers’ perceptions of families become more negative in their first year of teaching because it is something that we indoctrinate each other into.”

“There is a lack of trust between schools and families”

“We want our schools to be community centers, and that’s why it hurts us when nobody comes to our events… if our events were surrounded around something related to a community goal… those events are well attended because they relate to community goals and what is important to the community”

“Families know who respects them, who is coming from a place of genuine inquiry, who views them as a partner and who doesn’t.”

Frederick

“When we think about events, we are thinking about tasks. Partnerships are first and foremost about working with people in ways that grow all of the participants”

“When parents come in and they are combative, they are advocating for their kid, and they are doing what they think they should be doing as parents... If we can see those actions as advocacy, then we are flipping the script from “this is an angry, uneducated parent” to “this is a parent who really cares about their kid””

“Looking at the school as a part of the community more than just the community being a part of the school is so important and is just a mind-shift”

“Change begins inside and how we look at these things. And I think that is a message we don’t really like to hear because it feels kind of squishy… but that inner work is doing something, and sometimes that is the hardest work. And if you can’t flip your inner narrative about how you view families, then all of the other stuff, won’t be wasted, but it won’t have the impact”

“Teachers have to be willing to be vulnerable. We have to be willing to say ‘I don’t have all of the answers’”

Links:

Leigh Ann's resources link: https://bit.ly/efe_docs
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)

Show Notes, Episode 23: Testing Coordination with Carrie Prochaska

About this show:

April showers bring May flowers and May flowers bring…. Testing in schools! Many of the assistant principals I work with also serve double duty as test coordinators. It is a challenging job, but today’s show should contain some tips that make the job a bit easier.

Notable Quotes

Carrie Prochaska

“I think it is super important that we are positive and supportive. We know how everyone feels about testing and we don’t make the rules, but we have to play by them.”

“Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. A lot of the processes we do, work for every test”

“Stay organized and don’t wait until the last minute to prepare”

“Plan time during your workday that is going to be devoted to preparation, where you are not interrupted”

“Give yourself some grace on testing days”

“There is a purpose for this. We aren’t just testing these kids to death for no reasons. We use our state test scores to really delve into school wide strengths and weaknesses, grade level strengths and weaknesses, teacher grades and weaknesses, we use them to set our goals for the schools, teachers, and grade levels.”

“I can’t think of anything that can’t be fixed” 

Frederick

“When we talk about prioritizing purpose over urgency, we are also talking about systems, because without good systems we are trapped on the treadmill of the urgent. Systems allow us to work more quickly and with greater accuracy”

“So many of us are used to multi-tasking and thinking we can multi-task. Multi-tasking erodes your ability to work effectively. If you can talk to your principle and close your door for an hour, hour and a half, you’re going to get three hours of work done.”

“Test coordination is one way that we leverage our skills to help the school”

Links:

Carrie’s email: [email protected]

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)

Show Notes, Episode 22: Growth Mindset

About this show:

If you have ever played buzz-word bingo, and had “growth mindset” on your card, you knew you odds of winning were good. But what is “growth mindset” all about? As an assistant principal, you probably already know where this is going. Yes, we want our kids to have a growth mindset, but if we can get our teachers to also have that growth mindset, then we will be in great shape!

Notable Quotes

Becca Silver

“once we use the word ‘have’ we make it a fixed quality, no matter what we are talking about”

“people have equated growth mindset with being enlightened and demonized fixed mindset”

“we all operate in a fixed mindset sometimes and the goal is to start noticing when we do it”

“Just because a teacher is doing well in their classroom and their classroom is under control doesn’t mean they are operating under a growth mindset. How do we know someone’s mindset? We listen to their language” 

“Mindsets are incredibly personal and they can be tied to our core identity. we are dealing with the way people think about themselves”

“our neurons, when we struggle and persist, and eventually succeed, they actually get stronger… our brains get stronger when we persist through struggle”

“We want to create a space where people feel safe to make mistakes… you want to ask yourself ‘do you as a coach or assistant principal create a psychologically safe space for people to struggle and make mistakes in your presence?”

“There are three things that I always recommend if you want to create a growth mindset culture that need to be normalized… Those three things are: mistakes, struggle, and feedback.”

“One of the most damaging things I see administrative teams do is only give feedback during formal observations… that builds a compliance culture.”

Frederick

“There are a lot of people that have built this whole narrative to convince themselves that they are worthy and they are good teachers and to open up and question that would be devastating for them”

“When you’re working with somebody, especially when it is hard for them, you have to keep breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces”

“The structures of schools really aren’t set to nurture growth mindset in teachers and so if an administrator wants to change the culture to support growth mindsets, they have to change the system… First, we have to model what we are preaching, so we have to have that growth mindset. And I think we have to have accountability.”

“Observation doesn’t mean the same thing to you as it does the person being observed”

“If we want other people to be operating under a growth mindset, we need to be doing that as well”

Links:

Becca’s Website: www.thewholeeducator.com

Becca’s Instagram: @thewholeeducator

Becca’s Twitter: beccasilver_edu

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)