Helping Principals achieve 100% Staff Alignment and 100% Student Success| Buildership University
The other day, I was watching a rerun of Abbot Elementary and I saw this clip: https://lnkd.in/evGkTe6t If you’re like me and you skip videos, here’s the quick and dirty summary: It’s the end of the school year and Ava Coleman, the principal of Abbot Elementary, gets an email with a video she made for herself at the beginning of last school year. In her video, she congratulates herself for accomplishing all the plans she made during the summer. What makes the clip so funny is how wildly ambitious her plans were (i.e. read 400 books and learn Mandarin) compared to her current reality at the end of the school year. But we do the exact same thing every year don’t we? We make all these plans for all the things we plan on accomplishing this year -- get discipline under control, raise test scores, get a handle on the data, get into 3 classrooms per day… It all sounds great in the summer. However, the reality is we probably won’t accomplish everything we’ve planned (I know, I’m a ray of sunshine aren’t I?) But here’s why that’s actually a good thing. Most of the plans we make in the summer involve stuff that sounds nice, but will have very little impact on our goals (kinda like Ava wanting to learn Mandarin). In the summer, we’re wildly optimistic about all the things we want to do. It all sounds good and worthy. But will it actually make a difference? That’s the real question. Now you might be thinking, of course it will! It’s research-based. It’s best practice. The school down the street did it last year and it worked for them. I’m writing my dissertation on it But, is everything you’re planning what your school needs to be doing right now? You see, after working with thousands of principals over the last 18 years, I have noticed something really important. There’s really only ONE problem you need to be solving at any given time. One. Sure, you might be facing a lot of challenges right now. But how many times have we attacked several challenges at once and walked away burned out, frustrated, overwhelmed, and yet STILL no better off than we were before? That’s because when everything is important, nothing is. You don’t need a bunch of fancy plans for this year to be different. You need focus. You need to figure out what is the ONE problem you need to solve that would make all your other problems and challenges either go away, or become significantly less of a problem. Sounds easier said than done? I’ll reveal the secret – and better yet, how you can install it in your school in just 1 short week – next Tuesday. #SchoolLeadership #EducationalLeadership #PrincipalLife #AssistantPrincipal #SchoolImprovement #EducationMatters #InnovativeLeadership #K12Education #FutureOfEducation #SchoolLeader #Principal #SchoolPrincipal #ProfessionalDevelopment #LikeABuilder
