School Administrators: Filling Your Vitality Bucket

Whether you are a school leader, teacher, or parent, you are on a mission to take care of people and help them learn to take care of themselves. At the school level, trying to get our students exposed to and proficient  at 21st Century skills is time consuming and exhausting. To be responsible for any type of leading takes energy and passion. Here are some things I use to keep filling my bucket:

• Family and Friends: Surround yourself with people you love and who love you. 

Spending time with my husband and children keeps me centered. My parents and other family members do the same. From traveling around the world to playing board games by the fireplace, they fill my bucket. Surrounding myself with people who I care about and care about me gets me through even the most challenging times. Filling each others' buckets is rewarding as well.

• Colleagues: Connect with people locally, nationally, or globally to collaborate. 

In this day, they do not need to be people in your building or district.Working with people we can relate to and learn from has been key to helping me through trying times. Their support and collaboration fills my bucket. I am lucky that I work with a great admin team. I have networks through Twitter and professional organizations that keep me moving forward to better myself and my building.

• The Kids: Focusing on the ones we do it all for is instrumental to filling our buckets. 

Students are the reason we do it. Focusing on their best interests. Letting their learning and accomplishments become our recognition and reward is what it is all about. When I see a student take pride in his or her work, earn a grade that they have been striving for, or even seeing a light bulb go off as they understand something new for the first time is priceless.

• Professional Organization(s): Find an organization whose mission speaks to you.  

This way you can not only get the support you need, but you can take a leadership role to support others.MEMSPA has been a resource to keep my bucket full.  MEMSPA has been a great avenue to helping me feel I am a value to others and the profession. I have also been able to establish networks of support, engage in activities and excellent professional learning.

• Good Health: You must take care of yourself before you can take care of others. 

No matter who you are, exercise and taking care of yourself helps re-energize you and fill your bucket. Also, a part of taking care of yourself includes getting enough rest and eating right.

• Mindset: Make the decision to be positive. 

Postivity and the decision to keep your bucket filled and filling others' buckets can keep you on the right track. This mindset has been vital to helping me through a great deal of professional and personally adversity. Mindset is everything.

5 Tips for Positive Student Outcomes

While it is not an easy, one-size-fits-all formula, several factors are positively related to middle school student success. 

1) Manners can go a long way.

Education is no different than business, retail, customer service, etc. The kinder you are, the more people will gladly help. Educators are exhausted personalizing curriculum, formative and summarize assessing, planning engaging and challenging curriculum to match state expectations, and trying to get to know sometimes over 150 students personally when only seeing them for 50 minutes a day. Students who use their pleases and thank yous, smile and greet their teachers, and offer to help clean up at the end of a lesson get noticed. It is only natural for well-mannered and kind people to get that back in return. When students respect their teachers and use such manners, it is easier to establish a bond.

2) Strong work ethic pays off. 

Students who exercise and demonstrate strong work ethic get both noticed and the benefit of the doubt more. Doing all assignments with pride and doing them well has several advantages: 1) it demonstrates to the teacher that the student is a hard worker and cares about his or her work and grade; 2) it proves to the student his or her ability and skills; and 3) it usually has a direct and positive effect on the grade for the class. 

3) Organization is key. 

This is difficult for some people, and learning how to do and/or improve it is a life skill that is needed to be successful. Organization includes prioritizing, time management, and categorizing. If students are struggling here, it is important to try out several systems to find one that fits their learning and doing style. My middle school children use two completely different systems than I, but they both have found great success. It is key that the student own the method. 

4) Commitment must be personalized. 

Incentives work for many kids, but when the desire to do well comes from within, success comes easier and tends to be more rewarding. When teachers and parents want it more than the students, they often get frustrated. Helping students see the benefits and success and sharing with them your own struggles and accomplishments is setting up a good foundation for them. 

5) Home support increases student chances of success.  Students need to be held accountable both at school and at home. Regular attendance is directly related to better academics. Just 10 absences has a statistically significant negative impact on a students' academics. The more a student is out of the classroom, the more opportunities for learning are missed. Parents who check grades once a week can catch issues before it's too late. Setting daily routines of a homework time and place is instrumental. Even studying with your students has both academic benefits and even connects the parent with his or her child during adolescence which can be quite challenging for students. 

All of these habits can become life-long skills for our students as they grow into adults. Our world can be a much better place with organized, hard-working, well-mannered people who are committed to doing well. 

21st Century Skills: Positive Direction for Students

MCS teachers are on year 3 with student 1:1 iPads and are becoming strong experts in teaching and developing the 21st Century skills. Traditional teaching is not preparing our students for their best options in this journey of life. With students walking around with computers in their hands, having access to just about any and all information, memorization of facts is an-outdated, unneeded practice. Knowing what to do with information, how to communicate it, how to work with others and problem-solve, and doing it all with creativity is what students need the most.

Road blocks, however, exist. People become confused or worried when change occurs especially when it is not the way it has always been done or is not an experience that matches their own. Teachers are trying to make shifts in practice that is based on better practice, but it someones is not always greeted with acceptance. I have witnessed this with both CCSS and standards-based grading.

The CCSS is about a shift in practice; it is about a common set of standards for students. I am not so sure why so much political controversy should exist over having set knowledge expectations for our students to learn. That could be an entirely different blog post. However, the notion behind the instructional practice of the standards is to encourage students to think for themselves and dig to a deeper understanding of information and analysis.

Standards-based grading is measuring student proficiency on a set of objectives. This method is extremely informative, individualized, and fits the shifts needed to teach 21st Century skills, but it too is not widely accepted because parents pressure educators to give letter grades--they way our learning was measured and the way we were compared.

Traditional practices are no longer preparing our children. What was good enough for us, is no longer good enough for our children. We need to evolve.

My favorite understanding of the student-centered verses teacher-centered approach stems from the paradigm descriptors by Huba and Freed (2000). While their research was based at the post-secondary level, these descriptors and student-centered practice is becoming widely used in both elementary and secondary classrooms. These practices fit the instructional shifts of the CCSS and the individualized and personalized instruction that more teachers are delivering to their students. In my dissertation, student-centered instructional practice (SCIP) is defined using Huba and Freed (2000) descriptors which were factored together in a quantitative study. SCIP involves 1)  giving students continuous feedback; 2) training and treating students as sophisticated learners; 3) making learning interpersonal; 4) using teacher-to-student and student-to-student coaching; 5) having students understand, produce, and identify quality work; 6) having students being able to apply what they have learned; 7) continuously include teaching and assessing; and 8) applying both general and subject skills. SCIP differs greater from the traditional approach of where the teacher is the giver of the information and the students passively obtain it.

Stakeholders, however, sometimes see SCIP, where the teacher is the facilitator of information, as the teacher being "lazy" or not doing his or her job. As one can see from the descriptors, this instructional practice is quite intensive to plan, implement, and assess. It is this method which fosters the 4Cs.

Here you can find the National Education Association's (NEA) Guide to the 4Cs which highlights the importance of teaching them, resources, and definitions.

Our educators are working harder than they have ever done before. They are preparing our children for jobs that we have no idea of their existence yet. Our educators are making learning more engaging, interactive, personalized, self-driven WHILE being evaluated, judged, dragged through social media for taking risks to prepare our children for the new world ahead of them, ahead of all of us.

21st Century skills are the new foundation--the new 3Rs--to make our students successful. Teaching, fostering, and facilitating communication skills, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking are all a solid foundation for this journey, and MCS educators and students are paving the way. This is a positive direction for our students. Be a part of the journey.