School leadership matters, and though it can come from different sources and be distributed across the organization, we know that school administrators are essential for creating a school vision, supporting high-quality teaching and learning, developing educator capacity, fostering a strong culture, and driving improvement. Over the past few decades, thousands of articles and books [...]
Hello, I hope you are well. We at the Center are working hard to be helpful in these difficult times. You should have received a set of resources from us on Thursday, plus a survey so that we have a better idea of what you need. Everyone on staff would be more than happy [...]
This Coaching Letter is about many things, including but not limited to: leadership, decision-making, tacit knowledge, expertise, experience, and trust. I once heard Meg Wheatley give a keynote speech at a conference in Colorado. I don’t know exactly when it was, but it was probably around 15 years ago, after the birth of Google [...]
Hello, I hope you’re well. At least two of the events that I was going to attend in the next few days have been canceled because of concerns about covid-19, so I have had a little more time to read and think than I was expecting. One of these events was the gathering this [...]
This Coaching Letter is about plans, but also about how they connect to small cycles of continuous improvement, as everything seems to do lately. My friend and colleague Bob Villanova suggested that I read 9 Lies About Work, by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall. I think I’ll be talking and writing about it a [...]
On Wednesday and Thursday of last week I was at Coaching for Equity training by the New York City Leadership Academy. Personally, it was a very strange experience. My close colleague Kerry and I run Coaching for Equity training, so it was very hard to sit there and participate in someone else’s workshop, and not [...]
Hello, I hope this finds you well. This coaching letter is mostly updates—and of course some links to resources I hope you’ll find interesting. First, welcome to those of you who are receiving this Coaching Letter for the first time—big group of you this month because I add the attendees at most of our [...]
Inspired by the music lessons my daughter and son were taking a few years back, I decided to pick up guitar. In that first year I made steady progress under the tutelage of a guitar aficionado half my age. I built greater finger strength and dexterity, developed a modest sense of music theory, learned [...]
Hi, I hope this finds you well! The contents of these coaching letters are a mix of things I’ve wanted to say for a long time, things I feel like I say all the time, and things that I’m just now learning and thinking about. This letter represents a mix of all three. I [...]
Hello, I hope your weekend has been enjoyable. Here in Connecticut the temperature has been in the 60s, which in previous years would have felt like a miraculous respite from the winter weather, but in the context of the fires in Australia, seems merely ominous. Every time I speak or write lately, I seem [...]