The Book, Zapp - Leadership and Empowerment

As we progress through this semester,  a book that I read came to mind.  The book is entitled Zapp and the author is William Byham.   The book, Zapp, dealt with the concept of leadership and change.   Byham addressed the need for administrators to empower their staff with the tools necessary to bring about the change that will sustain ongoing success for their schools or organizations.  This book also discussed creating an environment of change through empowering others with the belief that they are stakeholders, which will then lead to a sense of ownership.  Additionally, it discussed how sometimes change starts with one person realizing that change is a part of evolving process that leads to a person or company becoming the best they can be.  The process starts with the realization that there is a need for change, identifying the reason for the change, the end result, and the steps needed to successfully get you there.  As I worked on the culture paper, the book reminded me that leaders have to ensure that every staff member feels empowered and is accountable to the success of the school.  As a leader, this book helped me in the area of empowering others with specific examples, such as positive reinforcement, being a good listener, and facilitating issues, rather than always being the one to solve or make decisions that affect an entire school.  More importantly, the book exemplified how change does not occur immediately.  It may take several days, months, and years.  Change may also consist of several attempts before you begin to see the results of your change.  Lately, I have struggle in my current role.  My school has been making achievement gains, yet in analyzing the culture of the school, I realized that there are still members who do not feel empowered or apart of the school.      I found the book encouraging with its message staying focus and knowing that you will eventually reach your goal.  If you get a chance to read it, I am sure you will enjoy it!!  It is an easy read and more importantly, I think its realistic of what goes on in our schools.

Tutoring Suggestions

I have a tutor program for 9th grade at-risk students and have matched students with an upper classman tutor. The tutors meet with the 9th grader 3 times a week for tutoring, support, accountability etc. A lot of the 9th graders have responded well and appreciate the tutors and support. But I have a handful of students that do not respond at all. These same students are failing classes by not preparing for test, NTI's, do not do homework. Their tutors are getting frustrated and I totally understand.
Any suggestions are welcomed for how to motivate these 9th grade students. How do I get across to them the importance of education and get them motivated?

Major Project Intervention/Rewards

I have just begun the implementation of my major project which focuses on 9th grade repeaters.  We placed our 9th grade repeaters into separate Guided Studies from the general population.  These six Guided Studies take place everyday and are in conjunction with their lunch period.  The biggest issue I am facing is the Guided Study is the ONE class that our students consistently skip and that is the class that I am supposed to visit on a weekly basis.  During this time I plan to meet with each student bi weekly to go through SMART goals with them as well as talk about their attendance, grades, graduation, Maxwell, etc.  Have any of you tried certain incentives that have worked with students in getting them to either come to school and/or attend all of their classes on a daily basis?  Also, my plan is as follow but would appreciate any other advice or feedback you can give me.
1.  Meet with 9R GS once a week- SMART Goals individually, talk about grades, attendance, classes, etc.

2.  Pull student grades and attendance weekly

3.  Call parents of each student and have necessary parent conferences with student

4.  NHS Student Mentors and Parent Mentors once a week working on Math and Language Arts as well as any other academic area

Leading PBIS Professional Development

This coming Tuesday, we are having a professional development day in our county.  My principal (I'm at a high school)  has asked me to lead an hour long session on PBIS.  We have kicked off PBIS this year, and so far, it has gone smoothly.  We have good buy in from the faculty and students as well.  The initiatives we have concentrated on, tardies to class and cell phone abuse, have really improved.  So, I am a little concerned about losing some of this positive energy by making the faculty sit through an hour long training. We all know how teachers hate meetings!  In order to combat this, I sent out a survey last week asking the faculty what additiional information about PBIS they would want to know.  I received some good feedback from this so I plan on addressing those questions.  I also plan on doing a data analysis on the referral data.  I will show our top behavioral concerns and show the improvement we have made.  Finally, I plan on leading a discussion on an area where our data shows we have regressed from last year - classroom disruption.  My feeling is that classroom disruption referrals are up from last year because students can no longer get lost into their cell phone.  I plan on talking about strategies and best practices to increase student engagement in the classroom and to talk about how building relationships with students will lead to less classroom disruptions. Hopefully this will be an engaging hour and we won't lose any of the momentum we have built up.  Can you think of anything I am missing or anything else I should discuss?

You Don't Know Me

There was an incident at my school where I was called to remove a student from a teacher's class. As I began to question the student regarding the incident, she stated:
"You don't know me, you don't care about me even though you all pretend that you care, you really don't. The only time you all administrators want to talk to us is when we get in trouble, then you want to pretend that you care and all this other stuff. You don't even know my name. So if you don't know my name, how can you say that you care?"
This really broke my heart because at my school, we try very hard to provide a circle of support for our students because for a lot of them, we are their last chance at a high school diploma. This young lady touched on a very important issue that I have struggled with the farther away I have moved from the classroom. For over 13 years as a classroom teacher, I prided myself on building relationships and knowing my students. Now all I ever interact with are the students who are being disruptive to the learning environment. This was a wake up call for me to remember that as I go along this journey in administration to remember to stop and get to know my students and not wait until they are sent to my office for an infraction. I would appreciate any and all suggestions for building relationships with students as an administrator.

Professional Development

The more I read the articles and research on teacher preparation, retention, support, and professional, the more I realize we really need to re-think professional development. Last week, I was told that we would need to work with our feeder high school to prepare a professional development workshop for all the teachers during this block that teachers had free.   When the coaches met, we realize that it was going to be difficult considering that the teachers needs varied and our school focuses were different.  So we pondered looking for some common needs because we knew that we had to do professional development regardless.  We finally settled on a professionally development topic, however, I am frustrated with the fact that leaders never consider the real needs of the teachers.  I felt this time could have been used for teachers to plan and collaborate.  Instead, we are occupying two hours of their time with a topic that we felt was general enough to cover several grade spans in order to satisfy our job duties and responsibilities.

Continued Challenges

As I previously stated my major project is to implement the PBIS program. I would not describe it as a well-oiled machine at this point be definitely a work in progress. I have noticed in certain areas student behavior is improving but the commonality is in those areas teachers are consistently rewarding students with school cash.  In the upcoming faculty meeting I will ask teachers to complete a survey that will provide feedback on if they think PBIS is working in the school or not. I expect this survey to identify if the program is effective, ineffective, or not having any major effect on students at all. One of the proposed suggestions to help motive teachers was to have administration reward teachers more consistently with teacher reward cash. The new hope is to have teachers excited about rewarding students with cash so they can receive teacher cash of their own that provides them the opportunity to redeem the cash with adult prizes. Another method to involve teachers is to provide monthly updates of the school behavior data in hopes to help teachers understand what is causing the most problems. I am constantly trying to figure out ways to get everyone motivated about PBIS, so far it has momentum but we still have a ways to go.