A LYS Principal Submits... Lead Your School

A LYS Principal submits the following:

Sean,

I hope all is well with you this summer. I thought you did a great job at the TASSP conference—a much needed shot in the arm. I enjoyed visiting with you and the rest of the LYS Coaching Staff.

I thought I would share some thoughts with the LYS nation today. Douglas Reeves in his book The Daily Disciplines of Leadership notes:

Feedback (i.e. data) is not about transmission of information. It is about using that information to change us.

• What will you do differently from what you did last year?

• What will you stop doing that you did last year?

• How and when will you know that you are making progress?

If the answer to the first question is a list of initiatives and the second question remains unanswered, then the new initiatives are doomed. If the answer to the third question does not include measurable results produced at frequent intervals—the daily disciplines of accountability and feedback—then we should not expect anything to change.

Remember, at the intersection of principles and evidence lies an opportunity to Lead Your School. Leadership carries great risk, much discomfort and plenty of unpopularity—as does doing nothing. While the realization concerning the above-mentioned questions may sting like a jab to the noise—know that the fundamentals, practiced daily, and with discipline always lead to improved student achievement.

Regroup, plan with simplicity and fundamental clarity, and come out hitting hard and fast from day one. Administer the Foundational Trinity with clinical discipline and precision. Always coaching to enhance lesson frames, increase power zone frequency, refine FSGPT transitions, recognize & reinforce more specifically and critical write, write, write…..

Above all remember we’re LYS Principals—I can’t think of a better point from which to begin “Tipping” from….

Succeeding Together…Whatever It Takes!

SC Response

Great post, great reminder. There is a reason why your staff keeps producing exemplary ratings year after year. Keep raising the bar for all of us.

Think. Work. Achieve.

Your turn...

Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “The Fundamental 5: The Formula for Quality Instruction.” Individual copies available on Amazon.com! http://tinyurl.com/4ydqd4t

Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation

A Reader Submits... The Classroom Doom Loop

An Old School LYS Principal submits the following observation:

Here is my classroom doom loop recipe.

1. Poor instruction

2. Students off task and don't care

3. Minor, yet chronic, discipline problems

4. Teacher use failing grades as their primary motivator / punishment

SC Response

You forgot the critical catalysts of leadership failure:

1. Disengaged, absentee managership

2. Poor or no tools, support and feedback for staff.

The silver lining in this doom loop recipe, adult practice builds and accelerates the loop, but adult practice can slow down and dismantle the loop. Don’t believe me, look at the initial remedy for each element of the loop

1. Problem - Poor instruction / Solution – Fundamental 5

2. Problem - Students off task and don't care / Solution – Fundamental 5

3. Problem - Minor, yet chronic, discipline problems / Solution – Fundamental 5 and Foundation Trinity

4. Problem - Teacher use failing grades as their primary motivator and punishment / Solution – Fundamental 5 and Foundation Trinity

5. Problem - Disengaged, absentee managership / Solution – Foundation Trinity

6. Problem - Poor or no tools, support and feedback for staff / Solution – Fundamental 5 and Foundation Trinity

Think. Work. Achieve.

Your turn...

Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “The Fundamental 5: The Formula for Quality Instruction.” Individual copies available on Amazon.com! http://tinyurl.com/4ydqd4t

Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation

An Exercise in Coaching Dialogue - The Summative Evaluation

A lot of non-LYS’ers ask me what exactly we do and why do principals use us. My answer is always the same, “We believe in successful schools, teachers and principals. We build that success though coaching and honest dialogue.”

Below is one example of what this looks like. It is a conversation between me and a good, young principal who has the potential to be great.

Principal X,

Here is the problem with comparing yourself to other schools in your district. For every campus in your district that takes the formative data process seriously and is working to create an accurate picture, there is another campus that is skewing the data out of fear of Central Office. Plus, formative data is formative data. It is now the end of the year, summative data time. What you look at is TAKS data. Did our scores go up or did our scores go down?

You had overall improvement in everything but science. Why? What worked? What didn't? What will be different next year?

Reading, writing and math improved, but not by much. Why? What worked? What didn't? What will be different next year?

Here would be the outline of our summative conference, if you worked for me.

1. Good job for a Rookie. You did not exceed my expectation, but you did meet them.

2. Though I'm proud of your activism and overall inquisitiveness, I'm concerned that it distracts you from what you were hired to do, making our school (yes, it belongs to both of us) an exemplar campus. Why can I say that? Your overall results this year barely moved the needle.

3. Next year, work to transform your “fox” like tendencies into “hedgehog” like tenacity.

4. There is no question you are one of my smarter principals, I expect you to be one of my most successful ones. I will measure that success by the performance of your students. Both School A (richer) and School B (poorer) outperform you. If you are to exceed my expectations, exceed the performance of both of those campuses.

Reflect on this a little bit, but don’t obsess over it. And remember, all I see is your data, your posts, and just a few visits to your campus. On the other hand, that is more attention than most supervisors are able to give.

But here is the important thing; I want you to remember that for a rookie principal, you did a good job. You took the school out at the beginning of the year and brought it back in safely at the end of the year. The degree of difficulty for that task is only understood by principals. But from here on out the rating scale gets much more difficult, you are now a veteran principal

I appreciate your passion for public education.

Principal X Response

As always, you have given me one extra dose of reality to think about and consider before my ego explodes. (My Supervisor) does not always offer good opportunities for self-reflection, nor do I even know, at this stage in my career, which questions to even ask myself to move forward.

However, given the cultural situation of this campus, it really took half the school year to get the pieces of the puzzle turned over before we could put the thing together. Many teachers needed the freedom to teach with coaching and guidance. It just took too long to get there. With that, we had to make moves in November to get people in the right grade levels, which I do not regret. It paid off.

But, you are absolutely right. If not School A, because of their demographics, School B is definitely in a tougher situation than us. I use them as a comparison campus and we need to be doing it better than they are. So, in that respect, it is disappointing.

Hard data is hard to defend without excuses. All I can offer is excuses, but they would not come to you without a lack of effort to move forward. In truth, what we did was not enough or it wasn’t the right thing to do. That is for me to decide as we move forward.

Thank you for the feedback and for the data. I appreciate the honesty and you have given me something larger to think about going into my summative conference, which is Thursday morning.

Think. Work. Achieve.

Your turn...

Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “The Fundamental 5: The Formula for Quality Instruction.” Individual copies available on Amazon.com! http://tinyurl.com/4ydqd4t

Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation

A Reader Submits... Don't Be a Martyr

A LYS Principal submits the following:

Earlier this summer, I had a meeting with a gentleman that I had little respect for when I first met him last September. But, by January, it was obvious that he brought more to the table than was first apparent in our initial meetings. You have to know me to know how much that means, but we will leave that alone for now.

At our June meeting this man was sincerely in distress because he felt he had failed my students, my school, and me. You see, this man was assigned to my school because we had missed AYP, several times. This man looked me in the eyes and said, "I failed you."

The truth, my friend? Without TPM, the school I took over had little chance of making AYP this past year. This year our jump to meet AYP is nearly 30%! Guess what? The deck is stacked against us again. Welcome to our world.

My point is, this man I respect has placed himself upon a cross, a cross that he did not create. Removing TPM removed a padding of somewhere between 10% and 15%, depending on which sub-pop was reviewed. This man I respect can offer a lot to education, but now considers himself a failure because of the details of a failed accountability system.

My advice? Get off of your cross; you have been up there long enough. Get down here with the rest of us and help us fix these problems. We need all hands on deck.

SC Response

This is what trips people up. Rapid improvement in student and campus performance is possible. But that doesn’t always mean that you get off the schnide in year one. It is on the struggling campus where the Stockdale Paradox is best observed in education settings. There are those who believe the task is impossible. These people are a cancer to the organization, but it does not mean that they are bad people. However, these cancers need to be neutralized or excised. There are the Pollyanna’s that believe that everything can be fixed overnight, with just a positive attitude and a little elbow grease. These people get their heart broke by the lack of immediate success or they are overwhelmed once they realize the enormity of the task. It is those, like you and the old school LYS’ers, who understand that the task is enormous. But as long as we do the right thing every day, as we get bettter at executing the Foundation Trinity and Fundamental Five, we will eventually succeed. Not tomorrow, but sooner than can reasonably be expected, in discrete, measurable chunks.

Think. Work. Achieve.

Your turn...

Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “The Fundamental 5: The Formula for Quality Instruction.” Individual copies available on Amazon.com! http://tinyurl.com/4ydqd4t

Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation

Top LYS Tweets from the Week of August 21, 2011

In response to the Top LYS Tweets post from 8/14/11, a reader tweeted:

LYS Nation,

Nice post, and you are right about school technology. But how do you address network security if students bring their own e-devices?

SC Answer

My assumption is that a "guest access" feature, similar to what is available in a hotel would work. You can still limit who is a “guest,” and you still can provide some filtering. Hopefully, your technology department can provide some more specific direction.

On a somewhat related note, I was recently visiting with a LYS principal. She has some teachers that are fired up to embed a little bootleg technology usage in their classrooms so they requested increased Wi-Fi speed and coverage. She told me that the cost to do so was around $1,500.00. Her campus would be considered above average in size and it is old, meaning fallout bunker-style construction. So for the cost of purchasing two to three laptops – Wi-Fi enabled phones, laptops, tablets and e-readers now work everywhere in the building. The time is now to embrace the power, flexibility and engagement of bootleg technology.

A number of you in the LYS Nation are now using your own bootleg technology devices to follow Twitter. If you haven’t done so yet, we want you to join us. To let you see what you are missing, here are the Top 10 LYS Tweets from the week of August 21, 2011, as tabulated by the accountants at Price Waterhouse.

1. Observing a student sneak texting in class. The technology and tools are there, we just have to allow our students to use them in the open.

2. If your campus does not allow students you use their cell phones, answering yours in the middle of class is exceptionally bad form.

3. If you are chastising your students for not tucking in their shirts while your shirt is untucked - You are being a hypocrite.

4. Just observed a herd of hypocrites discussing students not tucking in their shirts. How about using modeling as a teaching strategy?

5. Tonight’s Run Thought: The principalship is to school leadership as combat is to military leadership. Avoid it and your credibility is suspect.

6. Principals are effective when they observe and engage with staff. Improvement initiatives that ignore this are a waste of time and energy.

7. In an environment absent of feedback, people invent their own.

8. Instead of simulations to help principals improve their people skills, why not just spend more time observing and talking to your people?

9. Tonight’s Run Thought: A lot of adult learning occurs while you are sorting through the messy details of "process."

10. A compilation of what I observed across the state during the first week of school. I want to give a big thanks to Governor Perry and the Republican Legislators. Without you, the following observations would not have been possible.

A. Just observed 35 students in a 3rd grade reading class.

B. Just observed 46 students in a HS science class.

C. Just observed 30 students in a 5th grade math class.

D. Just observed 30 students in an 8th grade history class.

E. Just observed 31 students in a 6th grade math class.

F. Just observed 37 students in a 7th grade science class.

G. Just observed a 7th grade math class with 36 students.

H. Just observed 39 students in a 7th grade history class.

Think. Work. Achieve.

Your turn...

Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “The Fundamental 5: The Formula for Quality Instruction.” Individual copies available on Amazon.com! http://tinyurl.com/4ydqd4t

Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation