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 [...]
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 [...]