Saturday, May 11, 2013

A NEW LYS Principal Search - High School - Northeast Texas


 LYS Executive Search

~ High School Principal ~

A large, Northeast Texas school district is searching for its next high school principal

The successful candidate will have
  • Demonstrated leadership success as a secondary campus administrator
  •  Demonstrated success educating at-risk student populations
  •  LYS training and experience, preferred

Information of note
  • Large 4A/5A high school campus
  • Urban, suburban setting
  •  Diverse student population
  • Competitive salary and benefits

Qualified and interested candidates submit the following to Search@LeadYourSchool.com
  • Letter of Interest
  • Resume
  • Administrator’s certifications
  • Two letters of reference
  • Recent campus performance data

Application Deadline: June 18, 2013

Search Consultant: E. Don Brown

LYS Executive Search
(832) 477-5323

LYS Nation, Once again a school district is targeting you to be its next campus leader. Time to step up again!
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/Fundamental5
  • Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “Look at Me: A Cautionary School Leadership Tale” Individual copies available on Amazon.com!  http://tinyurl.com/lookatmebook
  • Now at the Apple App Store: Fun 5 Plans (Fundamental 5 Lesson Plan Tool); PW Lite (Basic PowerWalks Tool); PW Pro (Mid-level PowerWalks Tool)
  • Upcoming Presentations: Texas Association of Secondary School Principals Conference (Multiple Presentations)
  • Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation  and like Lead Your School on Facebook

Friday, May 10, 2013

A Reader Writes... CSCOPE is the Root of All Evil (Part 1:4)

In response to the 2/12/13 post, “It Seems That CSCOPE is the Root of All Evil (Part 1 of 4),” a reader writes:

CSCOPE, like the "new math program " of the 1960s, is failing.  It is hard for those who spent all the money on it to admit that most of it is badly flawed. Even now it is starting to die. The education system in Texas needs a re-work from top to bottom.

SC Response
How shall I answer this? Hmmm...

Point 1: CSCOPE is like the “new math program" of the 1960’s?
You’ll have to elaborate, because I don’t see the connection.

Point 2: CSCOPE is failing. 
Actually, CSCOPE's problems stem mostly from its success.  You see there used to be four options for providing a scope and sequence.

1. Just let the teacher decide what to teach.  That has failed (even though many still ignore this fact).  Letting teachers decide, on an individual basis, what to teach only ensures deeper and more widespread deficits in learning as a student progress from one grade to the next.

2. The district builds a scope and sequence.  That has failed (in all but the largest, most proactive districts).  Districts can no longer afford a functioning staff of curriculum developers.  We can thank the cuts in education funding for that.

3. Use C-CAP. That failed.  It was unable to evolve fast enough to meet teacher needs, so it went belly up. We can thank the market place for that.

4. Use CSCOPE.  When there were options, CSCOPE was the obvious best choice.  But now that there is only CSCOPE, meaning there is no choice, so people are pissed. As the saying goes, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Point 3: CSCOPE is badly flawed.
You obviously know next to nothing about scope and sequences.  The good ones are by definition a working draft.  Standards change, accountability changes, practices evolve, and lessons are discarded, improved and added.  As such the scope and sequence must be updated and improved constantly.  Our best cancer treatments right now will be considered flawed in the future.  But we don’t stop treating cancer with the best tools we currently have.  That would just be, in a word, stupid.

Point 4: The education system in Texas needs a re-work from top to bottom.
Define re-work.  If you mean that we need to invest in the tools and expertise necessary to educate a high quality citizenry and workforce that will ensure the welfare of our state and country, well I agree with you.  If you mean starve the system in order to perpetuate a populace of haves and have-nots, then I guess we will just have to agree that you are on the wrong side of history and humanity.
 
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/Fundamental5
  • Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “Look at Me: A Cautionary School Leadership Tale” Individual copies available on Amazon.com!  http://tinyurl.com/lookatmebook 
  • Now at the Apple App Store: Fun 5 Plans (Fundamental 5 Lesson Plan Tool); PW Lite (Basic PowerWalks Tool); PW Pro (Mid-level PowerWalks Tool) 
  • Upcoming Presentations: Texas Association of Secondary School Principals Conference (Multiple Presentations) 
  • Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation  and like Lead Your School on Facebook


Thursday, May 9, 2013

Make the Last Month Count


When you look at schools that outperform their peers, one of the telling differences is the urgency of May instruction.  Sadly, most schools in the month of May start to ease up and coast to the finish.  Those who don’t begin to separate themselves from the pack.  It is amazing what an extra month of focused instruction will do for student performance. 

This isn’t a sermon where I say, "Shame on you for not sprinting to the finish."  That would be the easy way out and doesn’t attack the real question, “What does sprinting to the end look like?”

So here are a couple of examples:

1. Loop Teachers.  Instead of taking the first month of school for students and teachers to get to know each other, use the last month.  Have teachers from the next grade teach a week or two at the lower grade.  They can preview upcoming content, review pre-requisite material, set expectations and begin to build relationships. 

2. Fact Month.  Every teacher I know complains that students no longer know their facts.  Use May to teach the facts most critical for next year’s content.  Build in a sense of competition with weekly team-based fact bees.

3. Capstone Projects.  Use May for students to work on interdisciplinary and/or capstone projects.  These can be either individual or team projects.  A consistent teacher complaint is that standardized testing has robbed us of the opportunity to connect and extend the curriculum.  What better time to do exactly that, than May?

4. Start Next Year’s Curriculum.  For most schools, the actual curriculum delivery schedule is from the first day of school until the state (or district) summative test.  Then from the day after the test to the end of school, the pace of instruction rapidly ebbs.  The actual curriculum delivery schedule of many high performing schools is quite different.  On these campuses, the first day of instruction of new content begins on the day after the state (or district) summative test and goes full speed until the summative test next school year.

Just remember, May is what campus leadership makes it.

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/Fundamental5 
  • Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “Look at Me: A Cautionary School Leadership Tale” Individual copies available on Amazon.com!  http://tinyurl.com/lookatmebook
  • Now at the Apple App Store: Fun 5 Plans (Fundamental 5 Lesson Plan Tool); PW Lite (Basic PowerWalks Tool); PW Pro (Mid-level PowerWalks Tool)
  • Upcoming Presentations: Texas Association of Secondary School Principals Conference (Multiple Presentations) 
  • Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation  and like Lead Your School on Facebook

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

A Teacher Shares... Testing for Testing's Sake


A LYS Teacher shares a familiar story. 

The Pigs and the Scale 


The farmer wants his pigs to be fat. Of course he does. The fatter the better. 

He became concerned when he realized that even though he fed them all the same, some pigs were fatter than others. The problem, he concluded, was that he wasn’t weighing the pigs enough. So he began to weigh the pigs a few times a year. Still, while some of the pigs were getting plenty fat, many of them were still skinny or, at least, not fat enough. 

The farmer decided that the best thing to do to solve the problem would be to weigh them again and again throughout the year.

So, the farmer invested a lot of his resources in weighing. He developed new types of scales. He began keeping complicated records of the pigs’ weights. He devised a system where he could compare the weights of the pigs not just individually but between each different pen and also based on what color each pig was. All the while, the pigs weren’t getting any fatter.

The only thing that seemed to be getting fatter was the wallet of the scale-maker. So, the farmer added more weigh-ins. And in the days and weeks leading up to each weigh-in, he held practice weigh-ins for the pigs. One day, the pigs were looking longingly at the food piled up around their pens. “No time to waste sitting around eating,” the farmer said. “I need you to practice weighing. Here are some tips on how to make yourself seem heavier.”

The only weigh-in strategy that seemed to help at all was eating a good breakfast. 

But even on the days that one particular group of pigs wasn’t weighing-in or practicing weighing-in, the farmer didn’t like them to eat. Pigs are noisy eaters, you know. They might disturb the others who are weighing-in or practicing weighing-in. Besides, there was no one to feed them, anyway. All the workers on the farm were overseeing the weighing of the pigs or the practicing of the weighing of the pigs in some of the other pens, so the pigs that weren’t being weighed or practicing being weighed were herded over to one particular area and told to sit still, be quiet, and wait. 



After the last weigh-in of the year, everybody relaxed. But the pigs wondered, “Why bother to eat now, if we aren’t going to even be weighed anymore?” 

The farmer told them that the weighing was only to help them get fatter. But the pigs didn’t believe him. They knew that the scale was much more important than the food. They knew that it’s the weighing that makes a pig fatter. They had been taught that well.

SC Response
Great story. Thanks for sharing!
But let’s remember that testing in and of itself isn’t bad.  Take for example at the beginning of the story the farmer treats all the pigs the same and notices there is great variability.  Once aware of this fact, a proactive farmer would begin to experiment. 

“What if I switch feed, would that impact all the pigs positively?” 
“What if I feed all the pigs, but differentiate the feed based on observed caloric needs?” 

Both of those actions would be better than the two options presented in the story. 

A. Feed and treat them all the pigs the same. 
B. Weigh the pigs more often. 

As with most things, the best course usually represents both a departure and prudent compromise.  Which also seems to upset almost everyone.

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/Fundamental5 
  • Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “Look at Me: A Cautionary School Leadership Tale” Individual copies available on Amazon.com!  http://tinyurl.com/lookatmebook
  • Now at the Apple App Store: Fun 5 Plans (Fundamental 5 Lesson Plan Tool); PW Lite (Basic PowerWalks Tool); PW Pro (Mid-level PowerWalks Tool) 
  • Upcoming Presentations: Texas Association of Secondary School Principals Conference (Multiple Presentations) 
  • Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation  and like Lead Your School on Facebook

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

A Reminder From the Big Easy... Don't Take Short Cuts


LYS Coach and Icon, The Big Easy, breaks his self-imposed silence to remind us of the following.

Principals,

When PowerWalks observations (or any lesser, FORMATIVE observation system results) are tied to teacher evaluations, objectivity is lost and any coaching based on the data is rendered useless.

SC Response
As always, The Big Easy is absolutely correct. And for those of you who have asked why we call him The Big Easy, here is the answer.  When I share the same advice, I word it this way... "Anyone using formative date in summative discussions is engaging in leadership malpractice and deserves all of the grief teachers give him or her."

Isn't it much nicer to hear it the first way?

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/Fundamental5
  • Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “Look at Me: A Cautionary School Leadership Tale” Individual copies available on Amazon.com!  http://tinyurl.com/lookatmebook
  • Now at the Apple App Store: Fun 5 Plans (Fundamental 5 Lesson Plan Tool); PW Lite (Basic PowerWalks Tool); PW Pro (Mid-level PowerWalks Tool) 
  • Upcoming Presentations: Texas Association of Secondary School Principals Conference (Multiple Presentations) 
  • Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation  and like Lead Your School on Facebook

Monday, May 6, 2013

Top Tweets From the Week of April 28, 2013


A number of you in the LYS Nation are now Twitter users.  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 April 28, 2013.

1. Leadership doesn't start with how to improve others, it starts with how you improve yourself.  Model what you seek. (By @gcouros)

2. Sometimes all we need is a word of encouragement! Serve and support... Lead by playing, don't be a spectator! (By @hjgrubbs)

3. You learn. You stop. You go on to something else. But your brain processes the learning for 4-6 hours afterward. (By @anniemurphypaul)

4. Just visited a class where the students--not the teacher--were summarizing their learning for the day. (By @TroyMooney)

5. More writing in every subject in every grade is the solution to our writing woes. When students write, they think. (By @STAARtest)

6. Historical advances that were going to be "the ruin of education."
1815: paper
1907: ink
1950: ballpoint pen
1988: computer
Today: cell phone?
(By @PrincipalFHS)

7. Do teachers who don't use technology secretly hope their children and grandchildren will be in classrooms with NO technology? (By @tra_hall)

8. Dear Pearson,
Please let me know which workbooks will include passages that will appear on next year’s STAAR so I can buy them for my school. (By @johnkuhntx)

9. The secret to making sure students don't act like school year is over is to make sure teachers don't act like school year is over. (By @ToddWhitaker)

10. School property taxes are 25% lower now than when Chap 313 was created.  How low do they have to go before tax breaks are not needed? (By @dlavine)

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/Fundamental5
  • Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “Look at Me: A Cautionary School Leadership Tale” Individual copies available on Amazon.com!  http://tinyurl.com/lookatmebook 
  • Now at the Apple App Store: Fun 5 Plans (Fundamental 5 Lesson Plan Tool); PW Lite (Basic PowerWalks Tool); PW Pro (Mid-level PowerWalks Tool) 
  • Upcoming Presentations: Texas Association of Secondary School Principals Conference (Multiple Presentations) 
  • Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation  and like Lead Your School on Facebook

Sunday, May 5, 2013

LYS Elementary School Principal Search - Deadline: May 11, 2013


LYS Executive Search

~ Elementary School Principal ~

A large, central Texas school district is searching for its next elementary school principal

The successful candidate will have
  • Demonstrated leadership success as a campus administrator
  •  Demonstrated success educating at-risk student populations
  •  LYS training and experience, preferred

Information of note
  • Mid-sized elementary school campus
  • Urban, suburban setting
  •  Diverse student population
  • Competitive salary and benefits

Qualified and interested candidates submit the following to Search@LeadYourSchool.com
  •  Letter of Interest
  • Resume
  • Administrator’s certifications
  • Two letters of reference
  • Recent campus performance data

Application Deadline: May 11, 2013

Search Consultant: E. Don Brown

LYS Executive Search
(832) 477-5323

LYS Nation, Once again a school district is targeting you to be its next campus leader. Time to step up again!
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/Fundamental5 
  • Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “Look at Me: A Cautionary School Leadership Tale” Individual copies available on Amazon.com!  http://tinyurl.com/lookatmebook 
  • Now at the Apple App Store: Fun 5 Plans (Fundamental 5 Lesson Plan Tool); PW Lite (Basic PowerWalks Tool); PW Pro (Mid-level PowerWalks Tool) 
  • Upcoming Presentations: Texas Association of Secondary School Principals Conference (Multiple Presentations) 
  • Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation  and like Lead Your School on Facebook