Being a leader is hard. We’re supposed to have a vision and develop a plan to reach that vision. We’re supposed to guide our employees to do their part to reach the vision and help them see how they fit into the plan. Often this means we have several initiatives…

Educational technology has always played a disproportionately large role in the budget and policy space. New technology developments get the headlines and right now districts are feverishly spending gobs of money on pieces of technology they could not afford prior to this year’s windfall. However, wise educators are being a…

I’ve always had a problem with the concept of grading. As a teacher, I learned from my colleagues that your grading policy is valid if your mathematics is accurate while calculating average. Slowly, I learned what validity was and that my grading policies had been anything but valid. I changed…

Are you prepared for today? Maybe you are and maybe you’re not. Maybe you had much more planned for the weekend and didn’t get nearly enough of it done. Maybe your inbox is still overflowing, or maybe today you will have to deal with a situation that fills you with…

It is not difficult to put together how student lives have been endangered by the pandemic. Like everyone else, young people could be exposed to a highly contagious virus, get very sick, and possibly die. However, as the pandemic and the attempts to mitigate it become politicized, we are seeing…

We are seeing an ever-increasing wave of mental health concerns overwhelm our school systems. Much of this has to do with the concept of trauma. An enormous number of students have had adverse childhood experiences, or ACES. ACES negatively impacts a students ability to learn, regulate their emotions, and ultimately…

So many meetings begin in the same way, with a bit of a lost “let’s see if we can figure out where we were when we last met” memory contest. This issue is really not about memory or about how meetings begin, it is about how meetings end and it…

For too much of my leadership career, I thought I needed to be invincible. I was too worried that someone would find out that there was something I didn’t know, or think that I wasn’t qualified. This made me defensive and closed off. I was sometimes short or avoided situations…

We’ve all been in the situation where you feel all set for your meeting, ready to go, and almost as soon as the meeting gets going it seems like everything is a slog. It’s not long before the thing you most wanted to talk about is relegated to the background…