Serving on a local board of education involves commitment, focus, and accountability. From hiring the superintendent to being advocates for public education to setting policy to being stewards of the budget, local boards have tremendous responsibility. Our stakeholders expect the absolute best for our customers, our children. So, along with these roles and responsibilities of ...
If you’re like me, you’ve attended your fair share of meetings (staff meetings, board meetings, cabinet meetings…you name it.) Most of these meetings have had an agenda but many agendas were just SKELETONS, or basic outlines of the topics that will be presented, discussed or acted upon. So as we’ve had access to technology tools, ...
Over the last two decades I’ve worked with school systems (both administrators and teachers) helping them to more effectively use technology. In most of these cases, this has been in the service of a technology company such as Apple, Promethean or eBOARDsolutions. According to this Edupotia article “Shaping Tech for the Classroom” by Mark Prensky ...
Successful school districts take accountability seriously and strive to cultivate a culture that values continuous improvement. School boards can model their commitment to these ideas by engaging in regular self-evaluation, in addition to completing timely evaluations of their superintendent. With the focus on technology and data collection it is easy to lose sight of the ...
Standards, pacing, assessments, oh my! Accountability is the wicked witch of education in that it has bullied its way into the walls of our institutions of learning and threatened to take away the joy of teaching. While I am not foolish enough to think that accountability will go away, I am advocating for the death ...
Education leaders want their districts and schools to be high performing. To do that, leaders recognize that they must create Performance Cultures. But what exactly is does this mean and what do leaders do to create a Performance Culture? Culture, simply defined, means “the way we do things around here.” At Georgia Leadership Institute for ...
A solution to transform public education Last week I had the privilege of being one of three speakers in the TEDx session at the NSBA Technology and Learning Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. The first speaker, Julie Evans, CEO of Project Tomorrow addressed the importance of listening to students about how they want to learn in ...
My dear friend and former superintendent of our school system always said that she never expected anything of her leadership team and staff that she wasn’t willing to do herself. Those words from a servant leader have always resonated with me. In public education, we expect great things from our teachers. They have to administer ...
Additional contribution by Bill Sampson We’ve compiled our top 10 Do’s and Don’ts for Evaluating Your Superintendent. Here goes. 1. Do create and approve the evaluation instrument ahead of time. Your superintendent should know BEFORE the evaluation period exactly what he/she is going to be evaluated on! 2. Do use templates to develop your evaluation ...