More than a feeling It’s the end of the year, when we reflect on the past year and look forward to new beginnings. I haven’t done any rigorous data collection about this, but I think it’s fair to assume that most people would rate 2020 as a giant dumpster fire. So let’s take it back to 2019. Last year was
Five years! Five years ago this week, I took the leap. I was a Community School Coordinator (CSC) in Baltimore and a doctoral student, and it was time for a change. You see, my data tracking spreadsheets were starting to catch on among other CSCs. I kept thinking, “How amazing would it be if helping schools use data to track
We can’t let them fall through the cracks. I started writing a completely different blog post for this week, but when I read the news this morning, I knew I had to shift gears. CNN featured a story yesterday called “Teachers and social workers search for students who are ‘missing’ in the pandemic.” The word “missing” made my heart drop.
Survey Fails … and How to Recover from Them Sometimes you launch a survey, and you’re blown away by the number of responses you get. And sometimes, you’re not. I had one of these moments last week. I was SUPER excited to try something new with my blog and launch a survey to hear what readers wanted to see in
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 the most well-known personality tests,
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 facilitate safety and high-quality learning
Why is it so hard to get a survey translated? I admit: I didn’t think it was that hard to get a survey translated. Over the past few weeks, I learned just how wrong I was — and ate a big piece of humble pie in the process. With colleagues, I’m working on a landscape analysis of how families and
We have to do better. I still remember how scared I was during the 2015 riots/uprising in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray. I understood the pain and outrage in the black community over the death of a young, black man in police custody, but looking back, I didn’t really get the depth of the collective trauma that was at the
The COVID Slide Last week, I watched a powerful webinar from Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center about health inequity and COVID-19. One of the first speakers, Dr. Nwando Olayiwola, started to talk about vulnerable populations but quickly corrected herself. She called them, “populations that have been made vulnerable.” What a difference such a small change made. Instead of assuming that
How Muay Thai Helped Me Re-Think Evaluation I’ve been training in Muay Thai (kickboxing) for a few years. I am always learning something new and being pushed outside of my comfort zone … and I love it. However, I am and have always been a perfectionist. It’s something I’ve struggled with my whole life: sometimes, I’m really proud that
