The Dock School Leader Podcast

In this episode, Steven Brubaker will take us on a tour of what goes into preparing for meetings. He proposes that good preparation increases the likelihood of having a meeting with good interaction, clearly defined issues, a well-developed consensus, and where you walk out energized. Steven is a veteran of many meetings. And as you’ll hear in the talk, he’s not here to bemoan losses. Over the course of his work at Faith Builders and in various other organizations, Steven has worked hard to become a good steward of meeting time where many people make a shared investment to produce a worthy outcome and are bettered in the process.

Big three questions:

Planning an agenda that specifies the priorities and sequence of the meeting and who is responsible for each step; thinking through who should attend and when and where the meeting should be held

Preparing for each agenda item by articulating the objectives for each agenda item and determining a format controlled by the items, collecting necessary information, and meeting with key players before the meeting

Communicating clear expectations to attendees about the when, where, and who of the meeting along with the agenda and what they need to do to prepare

The six hats of de Bono

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In this episode, Darlene Zimmerman leads us on an insightful tour of what it looks like to choose and create a classroom culture. This talk was addressed to teachers. I think it will be quite helpful either to pass along to staff members or to help you get into a teacher’s shoes and consider this perennial issue. Whether you are currently working on a school culture initiative or need a nudge to spend a little time here early in the school year evaluating the culture at your school, I think you’ll find this helpful.

Darlene taught for around a decade in the middle grades at Barnwell Christian School. Her talk is filled with helpful anecdotes drawn from that experience. Culture, she reminds us, is the way we do things and varies widely across schools and classrooms. We identify culture be completing statements such as the following:

Darlene highlights several foundational concepts.

In the last half of the talk, Darlene walks through what it could look like to develop three particular cultures and the practices and expectations associated with each one: rigor, compassion, joy.

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What sets our schools apart from any other kind of education? We all have access to the same books and information. We all have access to the same array of mechanisms for delivering that information from classrooms to the internet. Why the extra cost and sacrifice to operate and participate in a school?

What makes the school?

Jonas Sauder’s labor in education spans many decades. Probably most of us have benefited from his influence either directly or indirectly. Anyone who has met Jonas has likely caught a little of the joy that motivates him as a teacher. Not only has he modeled faithful, loving teaching but has worked to raise the bar and provide opportunities in teacher training and support. Besides his teaching experience, Jonas has over three decades of experience in school administration, helped establish Teachers Week at Faith Builders, spoken at countless events, and invested in Christian education in various ways through his work at Christian Light. In this episode Jonas outlines a range of considerations, questions, and practices that will enable you to continue growing in caring for the teachers at your school.

As you think about supporting your teachers, you might do what Jonas tried once. He simply asked his staff: “What do you need from me as a principle?” You’ll hear what they had to say in the talk. What would your teachers say?

Ideas for Supporting Your Staff

The Essentials of Teaching

If you haven’t seen it yet, take a few minutes to browse the Essentials of Teaching Series on the Dock for Learning website. It’s a concise curation of many of the resources available on the Dock collected into a series of 1-3 page downloadable PDFs. From classroom management, to planning field trips, to strengthening your science class, there’s a lot here that could assist you as a school leader in supporting your staff.

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We’re hearing from Darrell Hershberger this week on time management. As you’ll hear him say in the talk, these ideas and examples are drawn from his experience of making repeated efforts to address weaknesses in this arena. Few of us find a time management trick that takes care of all our problems. More often, success with time management is the fruit of deliberate and regular renewal. Darrell has taught for many years. Currently, he is the administrator at Hamden Christian School in Baltimore.

In his talk, Darrell sets out to answer the question: In our use of time, how do we find and prioritize: love, focus, and rhythms of intensity and renewal?

If you don’t have a planner, it would be fairly simple to make one for yourself based on the guidelines of setting annual goals, assigning those goals to specific quarters of the year, creating weekly goals that work towards the big ones, and establishing 1-3 priorities for each day. A Word document with a page for the annual and quarterly goals and another page for each week with space for the daily priorities would get you started. If you’re needing a planning template to get you started, you can find examples online or check out some of the links in the show notes for resources Darrell mentions in his talk.

You may think of life not as a sprint, but as a marathon. But we also talk about seasons of life. Darrell suggests that it’s helpful when managing our energy to think of our life not as one sprint or marathon, but a series of sprints. It’s food for thought.

But as Darrell emphasizes, stewarding our time to prioritize love for God and neighbor is not just food for thought but our central mandate as disciples. May these ideas, whether new or familiar encourage you in the discipline of time management.

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3-minute feedback: https://forms.office.com/r/1G564EGQkn

It’s easy to forget that the Christian school movement is not all that old. Some of the founders still live among us. On the other hand, when we stop to count it up, we’re somewhere close to the transition to the third or fourth generation of school leaders. The point is, we’re far enough along to be in the range when it’s common to forget and lose. Ken Kauffman cares deeply about stewarding what we have received. He brings long experience in the world of Christian education. In particular, Ken has done a good deal of traveling and interviewing in researching the history of Christian education. Rehearsing and pondering our history is part of our training as stewards.

This talk pairs a bit of vision with a lot of story. Stories of resistance and confusion. Stories of respectful appeal and patient suffering leading to such things as the transformation of a blue-eyed, blond-haired volcano of a lady (she would sit at meetings blowing smoke in the faces of the Amish leaders). She was on the board of public education and a key player standing in the way of church schools. Listen on to hear how that changed. Christian Light hopes to one day publish these stories in a book. Till then, Ken is taking opportunity to tell the stories.

How strong is your conviction for Christian education? Is it primarily motived by what you reject or by what you aspire to? Is your vision propelled by preservation, rejection, or aspiration? Ken ponders these questions before launching into the storytelling.

Ken offers four things he wants to highlight with these stories.

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This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about shepherding in relation to staff care. It’s a powerful metaphor. In this slightly shorter episode, Daniel Horst focuses on what this kind of care and leadership looks like in working with new teachers. He speaks with a deep concern for helping bring new teachers through the dangers and snares of the first years in the classroom and make it a journey of joy. Daniel is in his seventies now with many years of experience serving on school boards. He also brings the perspective of someone who has had several children enter the classroom.

In an interactive time leading up to the part of the presentation that you will hear, Daniel worked with the attendees to diagnose what contributes to what we might call, “New Teacher Syndrome.” Here’s what they came up with.

Daniel responds by outlining two main responses or roles. He paints a picture where the new teacher lives at the intersection of the care of a mentor and the oversight of an attentive administrator or school board. Here’s Daniel.

The Mentor role

The School Board or Administrator role

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Jonathan Erb, the speaker in today’s episode has 16 years of teaching experience, half in Anabaptists schools and half in a Russian Baptist school. His work with the Russian Baptists involved helping them to establish a school similar to that of North American Anabaptists. This required Jonathan to translate his knowledge and experience into a new context. He’s now working as a school rep for Christian Light in the West, which includes helping at teacher training events and administering a week-long teachers’ camp.

What does it mean to be Anabaptist school? Jonathan recognizes the daunting breadth and variation across the groups of people that see themselves as inhabiting the Anabaptist tradition. I’m summarizing the introduction here. Jonathan cares about contributing to a discussion about Anabaptist education. He is not offering his perspective as definitive. You should hold onto any ideas you have as you consider the question: What distinguishes an Anabaptist school? Bring your ideas and questions into this talk and let it provoke you to further reflection and dialogue.

Jonathan is forthright that the attributes he expounds are ideals as he sees them. It’s difficult if not impossible to neatly set the borders of Anabaptism and decide who’s in and who’s out. It’s still more difficult for us to see the whole picture of what God is doing in the world and how we as Anabaptists fit in. In the face of these challenges, Jonathan lays out the central issue of forming schools that have the attributes of Jesus. To the extent that we can accomplish this we honor the best in our Anabaptist heritage and more importantly, we take seriously our heritage as part of the people of God.

Jonathan also notes that trying to answer this question historically is made more difficult by the fact that few of the early Anabaptists had their own schools. He begins with a quick survey of how they did educate their children.

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Perhaps one of the greatest needs in our schools is godly, competent, and visionary administrators. Administrators have a great gift to offer to their schools, their families, their churches, etc., is if they are willing to pay the price of developing into godly men and women. Drawing from Ezekiel, Steven develops a biblical basis for the work of an administrator. Administrators are called to build up the wall and stand in the gap.

What does that look like? What must administrators do that no one else can do with the same positive impact? For those of you who are lead teachers, principals, or administrators, what tasks are you uniquely positioned to perform? And what potential can you uncover for your school by performing those tasks with competence?

Steven emphasizes three things that administrators must do:

Steven explains and illustrates these tasks.

For the first one, have a look below to see the lists referenced in the talk.

In addressing the administrator’s need to define the environment, Steven describes the reality that administrators set the culture directly or indirectly. They are never exempt from this role. They either proactively model and shape a culture or else a culture develops in response to their lack of initiative. He offers three components that are helpful in defining an environment where teachers love to teach.

Due to running out of time in the original talk, there’s very little here on connecting stakeholders. To hear Steven talk more about this, you can listen to his earlier episode on this podcast, Why Administrators? One of the big ideas here is that the administrator stands at the intersection of all the parties involved in school, including parents, teachers, board members, and students. Thus, the clarity and leadership or lack thereof provided by the administrator has widespread influence on the school. You can uncover great potential for your school by bringing stakeholders together into strong partnerships. Perhaps more than anyone else, administrators have the responsibility to steward the vision and embody the values of the school.

Lists for leading ourselves

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Along with our last episode on school structure, this week focus on curriculum are well-suited to planning for the upcoming school year. From working on your school’s scope and sequence to helping teachers focus their energy, Linford Horst offers a valuable mix of perspective and advice. Linford has many years of teaching experience at Horizon Mennonite School where he has also served as principle. See the show notes for an outline of his points.

Pressure points

Foundations/anchors

Practical steps

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Summer is a great time to think about something like school structure. Anthony Hurst is our speaker on this week’s episode. Anthony taught for many years and more recently has been interacting with dozens of schools as a rep for Christian Light and as a speaker at educational events. He brings a wealth of experience to the subject of structure in a school.

Anthony begins by distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy motives for school structure and challenges us to focus our school structure on serving our students and patrons and not projecting a lofty self-image. Our structure needs the guidance of clear vision, says Anthony. And not just the vision of one person but that of the community.

Structure provides consistency across staff changes and grade changes and across time. Structure provides a sense of security. It offers some protection to us on our bad days and keeps us from falling to the level of our flaws.

In the conclusion of his talk, Anthony also touches on some specific elements of structure that will help you get started evaluating the quality of the structure at your school.

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