Good morning! I find it interesting that the one thing I get asked about the most is adult learning. It is also the hardest thing for me to respond to, because the field is so vast and there are so many approaches. So tackling adult learning as a discrete topic in a Coaching Letter [...]
Today is Day One of the Center’s fourth annual Equity Institute, which I have written about (and tweeted about—check out #equitableclassrooms) before. Our approach to talking about equity is to use the power of story and the power of art to take people into a third space where it is possible to have deep [...]
I hope you’re doing well. In my part of New England we are at the peak of fall, and it’s gorgeous outside. This Coaching Letter is about communication, because it’s been a theme in the work I’ve been doing with several districts lately. Leadership teams have a lot of figuring out to do, a [...]
This Coaching Letter is about framing. I’ve been doing a lot of dog-walking lately, so I’ve been listening to more podcasts. This morning it was #64 of The Knowledge Project, and Greg Walton was being interviewed. He is a Stanford psychologist; I know of his work, and think of it as being about small [...]
This Coaching Letter, like so many others, is about change. Nicholas Taleb is one of my favorite writers. I don’t imagine I would find him easy to like--I can't think of anyone else so unabashedly arrogant-- but the ideas he writes about are always intriguing and sometimes a little overwhelming. I think everyone should [...]
Friends, I know it has been a couple of weeks since the last Coaching Letter, but I’ve been really busy and this one took quite a lot of time to pull together. My colleague Richard Lemons wrote a recent blog post about the idea that it is better to implement a mediocre strategy than [...]
I’d much rather you implement a mediocre strategy well than a “perfect” strategy half-heartedly. This may seem like heresy in the modern era of research-based interventions and metanalyses that show effect sizes, but I’ve been saying this to district leaders for years, and I still believe it. Recently, while facilitating a district back-to-school administrative [...]
Good evening. I hope you are well, and that those of you in education are off to a good start to the school year. I spent most of today coaching principals, and Wednesday is the first day of the Center’s Coaching Institute, so coaching has been on my mind a lot lately, obviously. I’m [...]
This Coaching Letter is about mental models. Karl Weick’s book Sensemaking in Organizations opens with a chronology of the codification of battered child syndrome (BCS). It was a radiologist who first published a paper about injuries in children, revealed by X-rays, that were not adequately explained by their parents. The author suggested that intentional [...]
Hi, I hope you are doing well. I see on Twitter that a lot of schools and districts are holding retreats and meetings to talk about goals and write plans for the year. So here is a collection of resources to help think about that. I know from my work with educators in multiple [...]