Blogs on Teacher Leadership

Spring vacation is just around the corner, and the dreaded state tests are inching ever closer. It is a time of year when you may be running out of ideas, patience and energy, and so is everyone around you (or so it seems). You have gone through three different behavior plans, but Madison is still acting out, and Sam continues to come late despite an untold number of phone calls home, detentions, planning sessions and positive reinforcement programs. The faculty room is rife with a combination of boring tasteless food, stale conversation and annoying complaints about you-name-it. You try to remind yourself that "no news is good news" because, although you are working your butt off, rarely if ever does anyone seem to notice.

My book, The Art of Coaching: Effective Strategies for School Transformation, was released this week. It offers a coaching framework and dozens of tools which can used by a range of educators. The excerpted section below is relevant to all who work in schools as we can all refine our understanding about where beliefs come from and how we can shift them. The following excerpt comes from chapter three, titled, "Which Beliefs Help a Coach be Effective?"

Last month, I attended the unique and energizing conference, Educon, held annually at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. Over the weekend of January 25th, innovative minds in education from all over the US and Canada converged on SLA to discuss emerging trends in education, share big ideas, grapple with issues and come up with solutions. The themes permeating this year's conference were Empathy, Relationships and Entrepreneurship.

I pulled up a chair next to a woman at the EduCon conference at the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadelphia this last Saturday. After some brief introductions I learned her heavy Southern accent hailed from Arkansas, that she was shocked by how cold it was, and that it was her first time attending the conference. I asked her how she liked EduCon so far. "I love it," she said. "It's not your typical 'sit and git' type conference."

That's a great summary, indeed.