Eduleadership
Justin Baeder on principal performance & productivity
Reading Progress Monitoring Chart
Aug 15th
In his book Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation, Kim Marshall recommends having teachers track the progress of their students in reading using a simple table:
- Students’ names are listed in the left column
- There are 26 more columns, labeled A-Z, to reflect the Fountas-Pinnell reading levels
- Whenever a student’s reading level is assessed, the teacher writes the date of the test in the appropriate column
Here’s the chart Marshall uses (from the Kindle edition of his book):
As you can see, when a student tests at the same level twice in a row, this may indicate that a student is stuck and needs additional attention.
Teachers can copy this sheet once a month and provide it to their supervising administrator or academic support staff to assist with school-wide progress monitoring.
I created this form in Microsoft Word, for printing on 11×17 paper:
Reading Progress Monitoring Chart 2010-2011.doc
Getting Organized in the Google Era
Jul 7th
One of my first summer reads this year was Douglas C. Merrill and James A. Martin’s Getting Organized in the Google Era, a book on organization and productivity.
The book is devoted to two primary themes: Merrill’s insights on organization and information management (from his PhD and background in cognitive psychology, as well as his career as a Google and EMI Music executive), and descriptions of how he uses various digital tools (mainly free Google products) to stay organized.
An unstated core premise of the book is that search (e.g. in Gmail) can replace a lot of labor-intensive organizational strategies, such as meticulously filing everything message or document in folders. This is a fairly straightforward idea, and not one that I thought needed a whole book to explain it.
However, the book is full of other ideas that are smart and useful, such as keeping track of important documents by emailing yourself a PDF and describing it in the message with keywords that you can use later to easily find it. He also suggests stating in the email where the hardcopy original is filed, which is particularly useful for legal documents.
If you haven’t read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, you should do so before reading Getting Organized in the Google Era. But Merrill and Martin’s book is a fun read and a great tour of the mind of a highly productive and creative leader.
Getting Organized in the Google Era is available in hardcover and Kindle e-book editions.
See also: Get Organized! Time Management for School Leaders, which I reviewed recently.
Get Organized! Great Book on Time Management for School Leaders
Jul 1st
Get Organized! Time Management for School Leaders by Frank Buck is a great book to read this time of year. I started it a few weeks ago, and recommended it at my WASA/AWSP Summer Conference presentation.
I also recommended David Allen’s Getting Things Done, but Get Organized! is written to specifically address the needs of school administrators.
Buck writes from the perspective of a (presumably small-district) elementary principal, but his advice is applicable to anyone in school leadership.
Most productivity books offer variations on conventional wisdom, but I found many of Buck’s ideas interesting and original, such as how to keep reference material for current projects handy using your tickler file system. He also describes how to use Outlook’s Tasks feature in a way that’s accessible to non-power users. Even if you’re familiar with GTD, this one is worth a read.
AWSP/WASA Summer Conference
Jul 1st
I had a great time at the WASA/AWSP Summer Conference in Spokane earlier this week. If you work in Washington and haven’t been to this conference, it’s worth the trip.
This was my third year to present at the summer conference; my presentation title this year was “The High-Performance Administrator: Managing Time, Workflow, and Communication for Leadership Excellence.”
If you were interested in my presentation, you can read my summary of the main ideas in this article. I will email it to everyone who signed up to receive it. Thanks for coming!
Book Review: The Principal Profile
May 4th
I recently stumbled across a book on principal effectiveness that you’ll probably never find in your local bookstore. Based on research done in Canada in the 1980s, Ken Leithwood & Deborah Montgomery’s Improving Principal Effectiveness: The Principal Profile describes four levels of effectiveness:
1. Administrators are building managers who use positional power, personal preferences, and other idiosyncrasies to guide their leadership. Goals for student learning are not at the forefront, nor are strategies for advancing the work of the school well-considered, articulated, or implemented.
2. Humanitarians are leaders whose primary concern is the relationships and happiness of everyone in the school (especially the adults). Decisions are made largely on the basis of promoting a positive climate.
3. Program Managers are more skilled in using decision-making processes and strategies that reflect more widely shared priorities, and tend to base decisions on student learning needs.
4. Systematic Problem Solvers are skilled in a wide variety of strategies for decision-making, school improvement, and goal attainment, and ensure a high level of consistency and performance directed toward shared goals.
The chapters detailing each of these levels are the best part of the book; the remaining chapters describe how the levels were derived from research, and how they might be applied to school leader hiring, training, and retention.
I can’t strongly recommend the book, given the enormous change that has taken place since 1986 (Ken Leithwood’s more recent work is much more significant), but it was interesting to see the terminology used in Canadian schools at that time, and the four profile chapters are helpful. The book is not terribly readable, but you might find it worth looking over if you are interested in principal effectiveness.
Where Am I?
The most powerful part of my experience in reading the book was reading the specific descriptors of principal behavior and performance at each level, which included characteristic quotes from principals. It was impossible not to see myself in the descriptions – and not always in the chapter I’d like.
As a general leadership development practice, it can be helpful to read descriptions of practice, and see how you compare. I’d prefer more narrative forms – stories of real leaders – to the descriptions in this book, but the quotations were nonetheless helpful in describing the thinking and decision-making of principals at varying levels of effectiveness. If I’m not performing the way I need to be, having a clear vision of a more effective level of practice is essential, and The Principal Profile provides just such a vision.
Book Review: The Checklist Manifesto
Apr 27th
One of my strategies for professional growth is to read widely – both within and beyond the field of education. I hope to regularly review book here from a school leadership perspective; here’s my recent review of Results Without Authority, a book on project management.
Atul Gawande‘s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right is my latest favorite. Gawande is a surgeon and a staff writer for The New Yorker, as well as a project leader for the World Health Organization and a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius Award” Fellowship. Here’s a bit more perspective on Gawande as an “educator.”
Gawande’s thesis is that checklists can be used to facilitate decision-making and reduce errors in situations of high complexity.
Obviously, checklists can be used to make sure essential tasks are completed in any arena, but we tend to think that they’re trumped by professional judgment in situations encountered by professionals such as doctors and educators. Gawande says we’re wrong.
Rather than replace expert judgment, he says, checklists can “get the dumb stuff out of the way” so we can spend our mental energy exercising judgment, not worrying about whether we remembered to cross every t and dot every i. The prime example from other industries is airline pilots, who use checklists extensively to manage situations of enormous complexity that require expert-level skill.
Checklists can ensure that we not only do certain things, but that we communicate with our colleagues at critical points.
It’s an excellent book, and I found many applications to my work as a school leader. The quotes and valuable insights I noted from the book are too numerous to include in one post, so I’ll share them in separate posts over the next few weeks.
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
Why Multitasking Doesn’t Work
Apr 14th
“Multitasking usually makes you less efficient,” he writes, because “the brain is especially inept at memorizing bits of information.”
–James Merrill, in this LA Times review of his new book Getting Organized in the Google Era: How to Get Stuff out of Your Head, Find It When You Need It, and Get It Done Right
Introducing Atul Gawande, Educator
Mar 14th
One of my favorite authors on improvement and performance today is Atul Gawande. His insights have profound implications for educational leaders, and he may be one of the most influential reformers to come along in a long time.
But you won’t find him at Teachers College or ASCD. Atul Gawande is a surgeon.
In Better, he writes about numerous aspects of improvement in healthcare. In The Checklist Manifesto, he explores the power of checklists to reduce errors in complex fields such as aviation (where checklists are ubiquitous) and medicine (where he hopes to make checklists part of standard practice). I finished these two books in a day or two each, and am working on his first book, Complications, now.
In addition, Gawande writes regularly for The New Yorker.
Here’s Gawande in a recent appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in which he talks about The Checklist Manifesto:
Clearly, there are many parallels between the challenges in healthcare and those faced by educators. I will soon have more to say on The Checklist Manifesto and Better from an educator’s perspective (you can subscribe to email updates using the form in the sidebar of this site).
Gawande will be in Seattle on May 3 if you’d like to hear him live.
Book Review: Results Without Authority
Jan 10th
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 When the Team Doesn’t Report to You: A Project Manager’s Guide, by Tom Kendrick of Hewlett-Packard. This book is written from squarely within the corporate world, and while Kendrick’s examples focus on the types of project work that you might expect to take place in a company like HP, I found it easy to make connections with the world of education.
I resonated with Kendrick’s experience of leading a cross-functional team, with many members from other departments. I have at least 7 employees in my building who don’t report to me, but to a central office supervisor. We must work together on numerous aspects of school operations, from student support programs to coordinating evening family events. While principals naturally have a certain amount of authority even over employees they do not directly supervise, the strategies Kendrick uses are very helpful for avoiding the overuse of positional power, which can damage relationships and result in minimal compliance.
Kendrick outlines three primary ways to influence and guide a project to ensure that you get results:
- Control through process – articulating and gaining agreement on how the work will be done (including how it will be monitored)
- Control through influence – using vision, relationship-building, rewards, celebration, and other non-coercive means of getting everyone on the team to do their part
- Control through project metrics – closely monitoring critical indicators of project health, and making adjustments when these indicators reveal a problem
Kendrick has a chapter on each of these aspects of controlling projects; these chapters are probably the most worthwhile for school leaders. There are are also chapters on project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure, but I found that these chapters got into details that don’t apply as directly to school leaders’ work.
However, one benefit of reading widely – beyond the field of education – is that one encounters concepts that are valuable to professionals in other lines of work. Thinking about these concepts from Kendrick’s book may help me better define what needs to be done for a given school initiative. For example:
- Deliverables – clearly defined products or documents that will be the end result of the project, e.g. a piece of software, a written manual, or a physical object that will be manufactured to exact specifications. In education, a deliverable might be a curriculum document, a service delivery model and schedule, or a written plan.
- Control – Kendrick uses the term control not in the sense of power or authority, but in the sense of manageability; to control a project is to keep it from spiraling into an unworkable mess. Making sure the work is realistic (in terms of timeline and budget) is essential for control.
- Metrics – specific measurements that indicate whether a project is trending in the right direction. While schools almost universally focus on “data,” the way Kendrick describes the use of metrics is much more diagnostic and linked to planning rather than judgments of success or failure. Are we on schedule to meet our next deadline? Is something costing much more than we anticipated?
- Sponsorship – in order to succeed with a project that may require more authority than you have, it’s essential that the project have an executive sponsor who can insist that you get the support you need. In a small district, this will likely be the superintendent; in a larger district, it may be another central office executive leader. The sponsor needs to know the purpose and plan for the project, and to needs to be kept in the loop as the project unfolds and changes.
Should you read Results Without Authority? Kendrick’s chapters on process, influence, and metrics are probably worth reading, even if it takes a bit of effort to make the connection between corporate PM and your work as a school leader. The rest may be worth skimming, as the remainder of the text is not particularly easy to get through. Kendrick gives good examples from actual projects, and the book features helpful diagrams, but it’s a fairly technical read.
Here’s another review of Results Without Authority, with detailed summaries of each chapter.
Regardless of whether Results Without Authority makes it onto your bookshelf this year, I highly recommend taking time to read widely within and beyond the field of education. You will doubtless find, as I did, many helpful concepts and insights that you’d never have encountered otherwise.
My Essential Mac Applications
Dec 6th
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 – my virtual file cabinet, for effortlessly keeping track of all information (text, photo, and otherwise)
- iTunes – essential for backing up the iPhone
- Firefox – increasingly the web browser is where work is done, and Firefox is the best.
- TweetDeck – the best Twitter client.
- OmniOutliner – a powerful outlining tool – much better than Microsoft Word. I will need to manually copy this, as I’m also upgrading OS X to Snow Leopard, but it’s not included
- VLC Media Player – a free, universal media player. More useful than QuickTime.
- Aperture, reluctantly – it’s out of date, but it has all of my photos trapped inside. Waiting for Aperture 3 to come out to upgrade.
- Fetch – FTP application.
- Caffeine – keeps the computer from going into “sleep” mode when you don’t want it to.
- UpOneLevel.app – a little script that adds a folder navigation keyboard shortcut for Finder.
- Curio – a great project planning tool, like a digital creative space. I use it for planning professional development.
- JungleDisk – for accessing backup data stored on Amazon Web Services.
- Skitch – a quick screen capture utility. Lets you annotate and publish/export screen captures very easily.
- Skype – I’d like to start using Skype to talk to people around the world, but I haven’t done so in years.
- TextWrangler – the best text/html file editor, capable of handling just about any plaintext file.
- Transmission – for managing large file transfers.
- Handbrake – for converting video from old to new formats.
- Quicksilver – a keyboard-based launching utility. They just released a Snow Leopard-ready version, after a long time without any new releases.
There are of course tons of other applications on my computer now, but I don’t think I’d go to the trouble of reinstalling them unless I had a specific reason.
What applications – Mac, Windows, or otherwise – do you find essential? If your computer was erased tomorrow, what would you reinstall immediately?
