Start the School Year By Hearing from Stakeholders Growing up in New Jersey, the day after Labor Day always marked the start of a new school year … and the day I finally got to wear the new outfit I had carefully planned and crack open my new, pristine notebooks. If you couldn’t tell, I… Continue reading Start the School Year By Hearing from Stakeholders
Don’t Be Like Myers-Briggs: Measure Your Impact When I started my doctoral program at Vanderbilt, I certainly didn’t expect to get into a … heated discussion, shall we say? … with the professor of my first course. We were discussing characteristics of effective leaders, and our professor mentioned that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, one of… Continue reading Don’t Be Like Myers-Briggs: Measure Your Impact
Now is the time. Fear. Uncertainty. Frustration. Isolation. In recent conversations with districts across the country and in analyses of surveys for clients, these words have come up a lot. Families, educators, and community members are feeling a whole lot of unpleasant things as we grapple with how – or if – we can simultaneously… Continue reading Now is the time.
Lifting Up All Families’ Voices Around School Reopening It’s easy to feel discouraged and upset when you turn on the news these days. So much is happening to progress the fight for racial equity and justice in this country that even a global pandemic seems to have taken the backseat. The truth is that without… Continue reading Lifting Up All Families’ Voices Around School Reopening
What will be your story? It’s not always easy to measure the impact of family and community engagement efforts. Some aspects of education — like test scores or report card grades — (notwithstanding the wide variety of controversies around their use) are pretty straightforward to measure. They’re already quantified. They’re known entities. We can tell… Continue reading What will be your story?
Adapting for Improvement in Light of COVID-19 I naively said to my family a few weeks ago that I was lucky that my business wouldn’t be affected in the way that so many restaurants and other small businesses are by the pandemic. I couldn’t see then, but it has become incredibly clear since that every… Continue reading Adapting for Improvement in Light of COVID-19
Telling Community Stories to Affect Change It’s funny where the most interesting and engaging conversations can happen. At the gym last week, I had a few random, but passionate conversations with other members of the educational (and martial arts!) community about youth experiencing trauma and how it impacts their ability to participate in school, learn… Continue reading Telling Community Stories to Affect Change