ED LEAD 101
Sketch by Al Morales
101 things I learned in school leadership school
The year after earning my doctorate in educational and organizational leadership, I was fired up to share some of what I had learned, especially with school leaders who didn’t have the time or money to complete an executive doctoral program. I also wanted to crystallize some of the thinking I’d been doing about teaching, learning, and leading more generally.
Impressed by the example of books like 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, with concise explications of key concepts, I decided to write a series of blog posts I called “Ed Lead 101”—not a lot catchier, I grant you, than 101 Things I Learned in School Leadership School! Here’s a selection of posts from that series written in 2015-2016.
All things are delicately interconnected.
Jenny Holzer, John Dewey, and the interrelatedness of all things.
Leverage the hidden talents of your faculty and staff.
There is more capacity than we know.
The best indicator of a school’s values is probably not its mission statement.
Check out the master schedule and labor agreements.
We’re better at what we acquired, but we know more about what we learned.
The technical (but useful) distinction between acquisition and learning.
Suspect school rankings.
Why rankings can be comprehensive or heterogeneous--but not both.
High-stakes testing will always backfire.
Garden-variety "accountability" runs up against a law of sociology.
Want to talk about any of these ideas and your school?