Eduleadership
Justin Baeder on principal performance & productivity
Why We Can Procrastinate and Still Succeed
May 11th
Have you ever put off a major project until the last minute, then pounded through it in no time flat, with no loss in the quality of the final product? Have you ever told yourself to space out a large series of tasks so you don’t have to them all at once, but then procrastinated, and yet still successfully done them all at once?
I’m working on staff evaluations now, and while I’m on track to finish them in plenty of time, it occurred to me today why procrastination doesn’t always lead to failure – why we can wait until impossibly late in the game and get incredible work done in a short time.
In a word, batching.
When it’s two hours before your deadline and you have to write the paper, complete the report, develop the presentation – there is no time for distractions, no time for multi-tasking, no time for shifting gears as you jump from project to project. You focus, and you get it done.
But it’s not just the power of focus that enables you to accomplish so much in so little time. It’s also the reduced friction of switching from one thing to another. I wrote five evaluations today, probably in less time total than it would have taken me to write them individually if I’d spread them out over a number of days. The skill set and criteria for writing evaluations are fresh in my mind, and I don’t have to mentally re-tool each time I start on a new evaluation.
Read more about why batching works
Performance Is Instructional Leadership
May 8th
The masthead of this site (currently) says that my focus is on principal performance and productivity. When we talk about school leaders’ performance, what kind of actions, duties, or art are we describing?
I just started Kim Marshall’s excellent book Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation: How to Work Smart, Build Collaboration, and Close the Achievement Gap, and it occurred to me within the first few pages that performance is, in essence, about instructional leadership.
Even though many productivity strategies focus on management tasks rather than instructional leadership, the gains in performance that can result from increased productivity are in instructional leadership.
Why is this? I think it’s because instructional leadership doesn’t get the attention it deserves unless the management work is under control. Being productive enough to keep your head above water can dramatically increase your time spent on instructional leadership. To use a different metaphor, you can’t remodel your house while it’s on fire. Management work has a built-in urgency that the work of instructional leadership typically lacks.
The consequences of ignoring critical school management work are often immediate and dire, though, so it won’t work to simply act as if instructional leadership is the only priority.
Let’s say a school leader spends 40 hours a week on management work – attending meetings, doing paperwork, handling student discipline – and their remaining time on instructional leadership – observing instruction, providing feedback to teachers, planning professional development, etc. If the leader works 60 hours a week, that leaves 20 hours a week for instructional leadership (and not much personal free time).
If increased productivity can enable the leader to handle the management work in 30 hours a week, that leaves an additional ten hours for instructional leadership, without an increase in time at work. This is a 50% increase in time available for instructional leadership.
Instructional leadership is “the work.” It is the primary means by which principals influence student learning, and we simply must create time for it.
The Principal’s iPad: First Week
May 5th
Last Friday, the iPad 3G went on sale in the US. Last Saturday, I bought one. This week, I’ve been carrying it with me everywhere, putting it through the paces in my work as an elementary principal.
The first thing I noticed is that…everyone noticed. It’s a huge distraction – kids ask me if it’s a big iPod Touch, and adults say “I knew you’d have one sooner or later” (my reputation is more solidified than I thought). I am hoping the distraction will fade as the novelty wears off.
The second thing I noticed is how useful it is for so many things. Among my favorite apps:
1. iCal – all of my personal and work calendars sync with my district’s Outlook/Exchange server, as well as my Mac and my iPhone via MobileMe. Having this always at hand via the iPhone is indispensable, but the iPad makes iCal even more readable and usable.
2. OmniFocus – this great iPhone app by OmniGroup works fine on the iPad, though a native iPad version is coming soon. OmniFocus is my to-do list and data collection hub – every newsletter idea, every completed observation report, every task I need to complete – it all goes in OmniFocus, and syncs with my iPhone and Mac (again, via MobileMe). One of the more expensive apps at $20, but worth it.
3. Mail – the email client on the iPad is surprisingly robust and user-friendly. I don’t answer much email on the iPad, since I type faster on my laptop, but it’s useful to scan my emails and dispense with anything that doesn’t need action or a reply.
4. Evernote – the iPad is so easy to carry that I’ve kept it with me virtually all of the time, so I can capture ideas in Evernote whenever I have something I don’t want to forget. I used it to take notes in classrooms today, which I emailed to myself, edited on my Mac, and forwarded on to the teachers I observed. Free.
5. Safari – while I will never give up Firefox on my Mac, Safari for iPad is the way your grandmother will finally “get” the web. It’s completely intuitive, impossible to break, and a great way to browse text, images, and video (HTML 5) on the internet.
Will the iPad change your work and life? If you have an iPhone, you’ll love having an iPad, especially if you’ve never gotten used to the tiny screen and keyboard on the iPhone. I will share more of my experience using the iPad to stay on top of my work as a school leader, and would love to talk to any other principals who are using the iPad at work. Drop me a line in the comments if you’d like to chat.
In case you were wondering, I wrote this post on my iPad, with the help of the $69 keyboard dock and the free WordPress iPhone app.
Atul Gawande Live in Seattle
May 4th
After reading all of Atul Gawande’s books in the last three months, I was excited to see him at Benaroya Hall in Seattle on Monday evening.
The massive hall was packed, and the topic – “Real Reform: What Is Great Healthcare?” was one that only he could address so masterfully.
I am not particularly interested in medicine, but reform and improvement in any field are topics of fascination to me. I devoured Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and Better, and (though it has less of a focus on performance) enjoyed Complications, too.
What stood out most from his presentation was the enormous potential for improvement in medicine. As in The Checklist Manifesto, he described a surgical checklist that has cut the death rate resulting from surgical complications by half. Fifty percent.
What if our failure rates in US high schools were cut in half? Our dropout rates? What if our elementary schools cut by half the number of students reading below grade level? What if we could see a 50% decrease in our achievement gaps? Any such gains would surely be seen as revolutionary.
It’s happening in medicine, and massive improvement is happening in education as well. We have the knowledge. Do we have the will? Do we have the courage to insist that our children deserve better than we’re giving them now? Do we have the tenacity to bring about the improvement that’s possible?
Thanks to Gawande’s presentation and books, I have renewed hope that we do.
Why Batching Works
May 2nd
Batching is the practice of doing a bunch of something at once. For example, checking your email periodically and dealing with it all at once, rather than as it comes in throughout the day, is a type of batching.
Batching is a great timesaver for many types of tasks. But why does it work?
1. Fewer physical transitions
When your email client is already open, or your phone message pad is already out on your desk, it’s easier to blast through a number of emails or calls. The act of moving to another location, obtaining other materials, or switching to different technology takes time, and batching can recapture this time for more important work. This is the most obvious benefit to batching – just as you wouldn’t make a single chocolate chip cookie from scratch, it’s much more efficient to physically perform a group of actions rather than just one.
2. Fewer mental transitions
Doing good work requires not only the right tools and information, but also having your head in the game. When you can do several of one type of task, the experience from one task transfers onto the next. For example, if you’re making a difficult request of one person, batch it with another request with someone else, so you only have to get into the mindset that these requests will require one time.
3. Fewer interruptions to yourself and others
The main characteristic of batchable tasks is that you can do several of them in a row, without stopping. Often, when we have to seek someone else to help with the completion of a task (e.g. the school secretary), we’re interrupting their other tasks. It’s much more efficient to interrupt once and hand over ten tasks, or request ten pieces of information, than to interrupt ten times.
4. The power of focusing on a goal
When you have ten phone calls to return, it’s easy to see the goal: get all ten done. Batching creates a clear goal for the particular set of tasks, and this goal will help you be more focused on getting them done.
If you’re not sure how batching can help improve your workflow, try keeping lists, and batching similar tasks as you work through each list.
Organizing Your Workload: Junk Drawer or Silverware Drawer?
May 1st
Is your workload as a school leader more like a junk drawer, or a neatly organized silverware drawer? Is your work spread out all over your desk and mind, or neatly arranged into manageable lists?
Think of every piece of information, communication, and work you have on your plate right now, and imagine that it’s all represented by something that might literally be on your plate: silverware.
Is that how your work feels – all jumbled up in a big pile? When things just get dumped in a drawer, the drawer can become difficult to open and close, and it can be hard to find what you’re looking for. This is as true for the ideas and obligations that clutter our minds as it is for the utensils that clutter our kitchens.
If all of your work is represented by random sticky notes in your pockets, on your desk, and around your monitor, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Your life starts to look and feel like a junk drawer.
But you probably keep your actual silverware in a drawer with dividers:
It’s cleaner, easier to keep updated, and much less stressful to look at.
But the work of a school leader is not so neat a collection of knives, forks, and spoons; you have eggbeaters, cheese graters, and countless other miscellanea cluttering up your desk and mind.
The problem with miscellaneous items is that it’s hard to create places to put them. Each unique item requires unique thinking about what to do with it, and this is very time-consuming.
But we don’t need to treat everything as miscellaneous junk. Much of our work arrives in predictable forms, and we need to develop systems that can deal with these common forms in a consistent and efficient manner.
To do this with the work of school leadership rather than silverware, we need lists rather than drawer dividers.
Request from the district office? Put it on your to-do list. Idea for the next newsletter? Put it on your newsletter list. Voicemail from a concerned parent? Put it on your list of calls to make.
But this can get extremely cumbersome if you’re relying on paper lists. Electronic tools can provide the flexibility necessary for getting a large workload under control.
Remember the Milk is an excellent tool for managing lists. There are countless others, but I’ve been using Remember the Milk on and off for four years, and it gets better every day. The web interface is terrific, and there are apps for the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, and just about every other platform you can imagine. You can even email items to RTM, and they’ll be routed to the correct list automatically.
Some lists you might start with:
- Lists of data or other required documents you’ve received from staff
- Lists of calls to make, tasks to complete, and projects to start
- Lists of items to include in your next parent newsletter, leadership team agenda, or other recurring communication or meeting
- Lists of feedback you plan to give to staff
- Lists of ideas, which you may or may not act on
It will take some tweaking to make your lists match your work, to ensure that everything can flow neatly into your system. When your system is running smoothly, you’ll spend less time sorting through piles, less time thinking “What is this, and what do I do with it?” and more time actually doing the work of leadership.
Improvement: Growth vs. Problem-Solving
Apr 19th
Growth is more or less continuous – as we refine our technique, we get better gradually over time. But growth isn’t the only type of improvement.
If there is a problem, a specific barrier to higher performance, solving it will not be a gradual process. When the problem is solved – either through an insight and a change in practice, or through outside assistance – performance takes a dramatic leap.
When you are considering your own practice, or the practice of someone you supervise, think about whether the greatest growth will come from a focus on problem-solving, or from refining existing techniques.
Ensurance
Apr 17th
en·sure (\in-ˈshu̇r\) transitive verb: to make sure, certain, or safe; guarantee (m-w.com)
The primary job of a school leader is to ensure that what needs to happen actually happens.
Doing work, delegating work, and making sure others do their work to high standards of excellence are all part of ensuring student learning.
Getting Things Done describes David Allen’s excellent system for doing work (and keeping your still-undone work organized in a manageable way). What it doesn’t do, though, is describe a system for ensuring that the work of the school is accomplished to a high standard of excellence.
Leaders are more than doers; we are ensurers.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: A Frightening Phenomenon
Apr 15th
Psychologists Dunning and Kruger
hypothesized that with a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,
1. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
2. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
3. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
4. If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.
This calls into question the wisdom of peer evaluation systems, particularly in systems that have a lower proportion of competent staff.
Interestingly enough, the researchers also found that the highly competent tend to underrate their own abilities – and they say that this is a cognitive bias, not just modesty.
This is why performance cannot be a matter of how we feel. For all we complain about accountability, without clear ways to measure our results, we not only risk overrating ourselves – we have a very high likelihood of doing so in areas where our competence is low.
Full report (PDF) by Dunning & Kruger
One other notable excerpt:
Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.
The Tickler File: What It Is and Why You Need One
Apr 13th
How do you get paper that you’ll need in the future off of your desk for now, without losing track of it? How can you have a clean desk and still make sure you have the documents you need in front of you at the right time?
Click here to download this article: The Tickler File: What It Is and Why You Need One (PDF)
