Leader 2 Leader

By Liz Garden It’s that time of year when there is lots of talk of giving and receiving presents.  I actually received an amazing gift at the beginning of the school year. After spending the last seven years as an administrator at one school, I became the principal of a new school in a new district.  While it has been hard work getting acclimated and learning the ropes in my new school, it has also been such a gift to be able to experience everything new in my leadership role. Do you want to know what the secret of leadership success is whether you are starting in a new school like me or whether you are simply trying to reinvigorate your leadership in a school that you have been in for a while?  Be present. Yes, the best present you can give your students, your staff, your families, is to be present. We can’t lead from our office; we need to be leading in the classrooms, in the hallways, on the playground, at the events.  Which is why, on my very first day in my new schoo

Diana Fedderman,  Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning Palm Beach County School District The role of a school administrator has always been that of a juggler, deftly working to keep multiple balls (literacy, math, science, learning gains) in the air. Now, toss in school security, creating a single point of entry, and managing the fears and expectations of community and parents, and keeping all those balls in the air seems like an even more daunting task. So how do we, as school and district leaders, keep the focus on our central function: teaching and learning?  The instructional core is the foundation of the school, and honing in on the literacy core actions as the building blocks is crucial to developing strong readers and writers as well as successful young adults ready for both college career. With ever-changing educational initiatives, one of the few constants is the call of the instructional leader to set the course for academic rigor. Defining what t

Are you meeting the social and emotional needs of your school community? Discover ways to hone your practices following the 4 steps of SELF: S tart With You E mpower Others L isten Empathetically F orm Connections Our society is experiencing a dramatic increase in bullying, teenage suicides, and school shootings. Lawmakers and school officials have been urged to rethink the importance of addressing what some call the “soft skills”.  Title IV of the Every Student Succeeds Act focuses on cultivating safe and healthy school conditions for student learning.  The Marjory Douglas Stoneman Act, SB 7026, emphasizes mental health access for all students.  Furthermore, recent revisions of Florida’s Multi-Tiered Systems of Support stresses mental health and social-emotional learning (SEL) as a Universal or Tier One prevention and intervention.     According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL.org), social-emotional learning “is the process thro

Assume Nothing! Teach to Every Behavior Expectation! Olivia Williams Today, school administrators are faced with a revolving door of misbehaving students on their campuses. They often spend more time administering discipline versus being the educational leaders in their buildings. This coupled with a shortage of qualified and effective teachers makes their roles even more challenging. In the U.S., 14% of new teachers resign by the end of their first year, 33% leave within their first 3 years, and almost 50% leave by their 5th year.  Why? Many teachers leave the educational field largely due to the behavior challenges in the classroom, and the lack of corrective consequences for student misbehavior. These challenges are real, but one of the best ways to meet this challenge is through facilitating effective classroom management professional development and providing in classroom support to remediate incidents of similar misbehavior. As research shows that punishment alone

Kinesthetic Strategies: Movement Enhances Academic Ability and Meets Learning Standards Students in lecture-based classes are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes with kinesthetic, multi-sensory, movement-based learning (Freeman, et al., 2014). Only 21.6% of 6 to 19-year-old children and adolescents in the United States attained 60 or more minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity on at least 5 days per week (National Physical Activity Plan Alliance, 2016). What do both of these things have in common? Students are sitting in class and not exercising their bodies. Their brains are minimally engaged and their learning is severely limited. One key change will greatly shift student success – include movement-based learning activities throughout the school day. A 2013 report from the Institute of Medicine concluded that “Children who are more active show greater attention, have faster cognitive processing speed, and perform better on standardized