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 [...]
Thank you for the feedback on the last Coaching Letter, about white privilege, I am glad so many people found it helpful. Of course, when I wrote it, I had no way of knowing that one of my fellow citizens would drive for 10 hours across Texas to kill “Mexicans” peaceably going about their [...]
I am so fascinated by the latest storm over “go back where you came from.” The New York Times asked people who have had that said to them to tell their stories, and got over 16,000 responses. Sixteen thousand! Most of these are the stories of people who were born here, and yet there [...]
Hello, I hope your summer is going swimmingly. As I write this, outside it looks as though it is cool and misty, because it’s overcast and raining, but in fact I know it’s 95 degrees and appallingly humid. I am dreading having to go out. I have been working on several coaching letters—one about [...]
Beginning of July already, can you believe it? I feel like spring break was just a couple of weeks ago. At the same time, it’s only two weeks since we were getting to start HQI Live in Milford, and that seems like a very long time ago—so much has happened since then. The Strategy [...]
Friends, I hope this finds you well. I feel like I am stealing a few moments between the end of HQI Live in Milford yesterday and the Strategy Workshop at Connecticut College next week—an intense couple of weeks! But I wanted to write about the similarities between the two, partly for my own benefit [...]