Eduleadership

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Posts by Eduleadership

Book Review: Results Without Authority

January 10, 2010 - 2:18 pm

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Posted in Books & Resources | No Comments

My school district has taken an interest in project management (PM) lately, and while principals have not been part of the PM training, I thought I would look into the field and see what I could learn to help in my work.
The book that rose to my attention is Results Without Authority: Controlling a Project [...]

My Essential Mac Applications

December 6, 2009 - 1:59 pm

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Posted in Books & Resources | 3 Comments

I will be upgrading my laptop’s hard drive soon, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to share a list of the Mac applications I plan to keep:

Microsoft Office – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage. Poorly written, but essential, especially for email and calendar sync with Exchange Server.
OmniFocus for keeping track of tasks
Evernote – [...]

Physics Envy: Why “Best Practices” Don’t Scale Up Well (and What to Do About It)

November 29, 2009 - 2:13 pm

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Posted in Quotes, Research | No Comments

Is education a science, and if so, what kind of science? What implications does this have for instructional leadership?
We typically think of physics as the ideal science – it is consistent, universal, and predictable. An experiment conducted in France can be replicated in Mexico or the United States, and the same results can be expected. [...]

Managing To-Do Lists

November 23, 2009 - 3:31 pm

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Posted in Essays | 3 Comments

How do you keep track of your tasks? Do you have a to-do list, a random collection of sticky notes, a journal, or a more complex system?
If you keep a to-do list, a common problem is that the list gets too long, and it becomes harder to sort through it. When you reach this point, [...]

Feedback for Performance: Low-Hanging Fruit

November 15, 2009 - 10:17 pm

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When giving feedback to improve the performance of those you supervise, where do you start?
If something is painfully wrong, it’s obvious where to focus your attention. If you observe practices that are harmful to students, unethical, unprofessional, or unsafe, it’s easy to know what to address first.
Most of the time, though, we need to [...]

Feedback for Performance

November 1, 2009 - 10:04 pm

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If we want to get better results, we can change the working conditions, the inputs, or the actions we take to do the work. As individuals, we often don’t have much control over the inputs or conditions of our work, so the primary point of leverage for improvement is the set of actions we take [...]

A Response to Cliff Mass on Math Standards and Assessment

October 24, 2009 - 12:31 am

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Posted in Essays, Links | 3 Comments

Seattle meteorologist Cliff Mass, who is a prolific blogger, as well as a UW professor, is also an active member of Where’s the Math?, a parent advocacy group working to improve mathematics instruction in Washington.
Cliff recently had a post on his blog suggesting that OSPI (the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, our [...]

Teaching for a Living: Views of Principal Support

October 20, 2009 - 11:50 pm

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Posted in Research | No Comments

This survey from Public Agenda contains a host of information about teachers’ views about their profession.
One set of findings is of particular relevance to principals. The study divided teachers into three groups – contented, disheartened, and idealists. While surveys of this type show only correlation (not causation), teacher responses about the support they get [...]

A/B Testing: Finding the Best Option

October 19, 2009 - 3:10 am

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Today I read a quantitative study of class-size effects, conducted in Tennessee around 1990. This study (Finn & Achilles, 1990) randomly assigned teachers and students to one of three conditions – small class size, regular class size, or regular class size with aide.
The findings are interesting, but I’d like to point out something unusual [...]

Insignificant?

October 13, 2009 - 10:54 pm

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As I was entering our standardized test data into a strategic plan template this morning, I saw that one of the options for the various subgroups (Native American, African American, Latino, Free/Reduced Lunch, etc.) was:
n < required
In other words, No Child Left Behind does not hold us accountable as a school for this group’s performance, [...]

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