Welcome back to Flipping the Focus.
In the last post, I shared the following personal, belief statement:
The Message...
Relationships are vitally important to cultivating educational communities that effectively serve the needs of all stakeholders.
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What can WE do to build strong, collaborative cultures amongst those WE serve?
By following the links embedded, below, I'd like to encourage you and your colleagues to access the remainder of 1) A.J.'s article and 2) my response to the article.
In his little book, there are so many big quotes and lessons on how to actually “get along” with people and have some “influence”. As leaders and teachers, this is a great book to learn from. We are constantly striving to have a positive impact and influence on teachers and students, yet we often put that “skill” on the back burner.
Instead, we focus on debating the Common Core standards, talking about the next big thing in “Ed Tech”, and looking at how many different ways we can “reform” education.
Maybe some things do need to change (I’m sure we can all agree on that broad statement) but our focus has to stay on positively impacting the lives of students in our school" (read more).
Where to Next with OUR Learning?
The timely and important consideration for us now is to make our vision actionable: vision is built through action. We might be thinking 'this' now, but what are we going to DO with 'this' now? Here are some questions to help with framing some, potential next steps in your leadership for moving "from"..."towards"...continuous improvement.
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A) How might you use this information in your learning or in that of your __________ (ALL levels of service)? (THINK: "Backwards Design" FROM some of the suggested prompts TOWARDS creating guiding questions for your explorations.)
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1-FROM: How will we use the information gathered through students' voices?
- TOWARDS: ???
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2-FROM: How will we use the information from exploring belonging through inquiry?
- TOWARDS: ???
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3-FROM: How will we use the data gathered during the course of our monitoring?
- TOWARDS: ???
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4-FROM: How will we use the information gathered from building coherence (e.g., through networks)?
- TOWARDS: ???
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1-FROM: How will we use the information gathered through students' voices?
- B) How might we best measure for impacting the furthest outcomes: students' learning and school engagement? (This might be a guiding, TOWARDS question for #3, above)
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C) What other insights are you deriving from your sources of inspiration?
- Combined with persistence, the flexibility offered in discussing insights might be good for crafting a guiding, TOWARDS question for #2, above)
As this blog is a means for readers to network and gradually change the context for how you/your class/school/district operates, we all benefit by drawing nearer to the perspectives shared here and shared beyond with our professional learning networks.
I am more than happy to collaborate with you and feature our learning, here, in this blog and across Flipping the Focus' social media platforms (Facebook and Instagram at FlippingtheFocus and
Twitter @flip4change), as well as those of your own.
Contact Flipping the Focus to see how we can work together towards achieving your/your organization's goals.
Professionally Yours,
Chris Stewart, OCT
Educational Consultant, Flipping the Focus, (c) 2018