School Community Relations

(Summary video created by Dr. Judy Horrocks)

My first course this summer focused on School Community Relations and was a great start to the semester!  Unlike most of the courses here at Lehigh (predominantly filled with overseas teachers), this course was an equal mix of US based teachers/administrators and international school educators.  This mix really allowed our group to have some great discussions about communication structures in schools today, and helped us to identify common strategies to help build effective public relations plans in our different settings.  Over the session, we had some great discussions and the following themes emerged as I begin to think about improving school communication next year.

• Image is important - It has often been said, but perception is reality within schools and the image that stakeholders have of your school will affect the way they act and the choices they make.  Therefore it is important that school leaders understand the importance of public relations to ensure that the perception of their schools match the reality.

• Relationships are key - As with most aspects of leadership, effective communication begins with effective relationships.  This is most important within the immediate school community, but it is also very important to establish links with outside organizations (newspapers, government agencies, local arts community, etc) that could play a significant role in your school's program or reputation.   

• Communication must be two way in order to be effective - when building communication plans, it is important to ensure that feedback loops are present.  Furthermore, it is necessary that feedback is collected from various groups within the school community to try and get a clear picture of public perception.

• Emotion plays a large role in communication - In schools, we are working with people, and emotion is always going to be part of difficult discussions.  As administrators, it is often useful to step away from a situation and determine the needs of the communities to determine future plans. There are many times when people may react negatively to change because of an emotional need (how will this affect my child, how will this affect my job, etc) rather than reacting to the change itself.  If we can first speak to the emotional concern, the follow up communication becomes much easier for everyone.

• Social media needs to be included - Although there are still very few schools that have embraced social media in school communication plans, we had some great discussions about how these tools can be used to facilitate effective two way communication.  As schools develop their plans for communication in today's environment, it is extremely important that they incorporate social media in their efforts.  School's that are most effective using social networking tools have a clearly defined audience and purpose for the tools that they employ

Although I am sure that this is not an exhaustive list, I do feel like I have a much better understanding of the importance of public relations and how this affects schools today.  As always, I am looking forward to seeing how this will affect our practices at ACS and would be interested to hear your thoughts on how you handle public relations in your school or district.

Back to School

I am back on campus at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania completing my second summer of courses working towards my doctorate in Educational Leadership.  Although it is going to be a busy summer, I am very excited to get back on campus and participate in some face to face learning after working through on-line courses for the past two semesters. 

This summer, I will be taking three courses including School Community Relations, Curriculum in a Global Society and Managing and Leading Change.  My other main goal while I am on campus is to get final approval for my dissertation topic and find a chair for my committee. 
At this point, I am planning on looking at the effectiveness of professional development programs in international schools and am hoping to get support from the Faculty so that I can earnestly begin writing up my introduction and literature review sections.

As always, the summer is a time for rejuvenation and I know that I left my courses last summer energized and ready for a great year.  Thankfully, there is a great group of educators each year on campus, and I always enjoy the opportunity to discuss and analyze our practices.  I am sure that the collaborative nature of the courses here at Lehigh will once again push me to examine my own work and help me to become a more effective principal next year at ACS!

Tips for Conducting PLN Professional Development

Over the past year, I have been using various social networking tools to promote my own learning.  The discovery of these tools has had a profound impact on my own learning as I have been able to connect with hundreds of educators around the world and engage in professional discussions about our educational practice.  As an advocate for the use of these tools, I have been working within the structure of our school PD days to provide workshops and training to faculty members who wish to discover how social networking can improve their own development as teachers.  Now that I have conducted a few of these workshops, I thought I might share some of my ideas of how others might begin introducing these powerful tools to their colleagues.

Use the resources of your PLN - Thankfully, there are many people who are conducting sessions helping people to become connected and there was no need to start from scratch.  There are some great youtube videos which describe the purpose of PLN's (here and here).  There is also an amazing amount of resources to help teachers understand the purpose of twitter.  Some of the most useful ones that I have found are from Angela Maiers, Joe Stumple and Edudemic.  Having these resources in hand helped provide me with some of the courage I needed to get in front of a crowd and get people started.

  You need to provide participants with a "container" for these tools - I believe that this is a very important part of any workshop since these tools can be very difficult to manage without an integrated system.  The workshops that I have run have been designed to use Google Chrome as our container.  Google Chrome's extensions allow for everyone to easily integrate various networking tools (google reader, twitter, diigo, etc) in one central location that can be used on a daily basis.  Usually, I have asked participants to come with Chrome loaded onto their computers and we spend the first portion of the workshop signing up for accounts in google reader, twitter and diigo and installing the google extensions for these tools.  Once everyone has established their accounts, we subscribe to a reader bundle (George Couros has a great bundle here) and a couple twitter hashtags and lists that they can begin to follow (I have used #edchat, #cpchat or Liz Davis' Twitter list).  This allows the participants to become instant consumers of information and allows me to demonstrate how they can use diigo to save and share important bookmarks.  In addition, we can begin to find people to follow from the hashtag conversations in twitter and learn about re-tweeting, direct messages etc.

There needs to be time to play - I think that this is the most important part of the workshop and try to devote as much time as possible to this activity.  When working with our k - 12 faculty members, it is very normal to have a very diverse group of teachers together in the same room, and it is my hope that everyone who attends has the time to tailor these tools to their own specific disciplines or interests.  Personally, I went to a few different workshops that sold me on how great blogs, twitter, etc are but left without actually setting up a system to use these tools.  I know that the more time that I can spend helping teachers tailor these tools, the more likely they will continue to use them once they leave the workshop

Don't forget to follow up - Jesse McLean recently wrote a good post about how important this was for him and I know that a little push after the workshop can help someone get through a "twitter block."  As I mentioned earlier, the whole point of this workshop is to try and create a manageable system to develop and participate in a personal learning network.   Sometimes, it may take reconnecting with people to see if they have any follow up questions or need some help using these tools.

I have had a lot of fun introducing my colleagues to some of these tools and I am hopeful that they feel confident enough after these workshops to connect and engage with people around the world.   If you have any other great tips for conducting a PLN building workshop, please feel free to leave a comment.

Visiting Author Program

For the past four years, our school has invested in our visiting author program as an opportunity for our students to interact with professional authors.  I am happy to say that this investment has been very worthwhile and I believe these visits have had a profound impact on our school culture and our writing program.   Over the past four years, we have had visits from professional writers such as Taylor Mali, Marc Leavitt, Ibtisam Barakat, Sara Holbrook and Michael Salinger.  For the most part, the middle school has brought in poets to work with our students and we have found that our students have really responded to the passion that our authors have brought to their lessons.  This year, we were fortunate enough to have Naomi Shihab Nye visit our school for a week to discuss her work and share her thoughts with students, teachers and parents about how we can promote our students to become more active writers. 

One of the most profound impacts that these visits have had our instructional program was the modification of our writing units in middle school.  In the past, each grade level would work on various writing units throughout the year independently.  Now, we are able to schedule our visiting author to arrive at the beginning of our poetry units and use their visit as our “hook” to launch our division wide poetry work.  These units will end with our 3^rd annual middle school poetry slam which gives all of our students the opportunity to share their work with live audiences.

Naomi’s visit definitely helped us to blast into poetry and it has been great walking through classes this past week and seeing our students engaged in reading and writing poetry.  This enthusiasm for poetry can be summed up with a letter that one of our 6^th grade students sent her teacher.

Dear Ms. Pohl

I had an idea for Viper Vision (I couldn’t wait to tell you on Sunday, but I’m sending you an email because I thought I would forget).  My idea was that we should have a poetry section in the MS newspaper, because it is our poetry unit and some people would like their poems to be read and noticed (like me).

Also, I have been writing Haiku.  Today I wrote 5!  I want to show them to you.  I wrote them in my tiny notebook that I take everywhere.

I really like poetry now.  I think Naomi Shihab Nye, poets I enjoy and you have really opened my eyes to different types of poems.  Thank you.

Thank you to all of the visiting authors that have taken the time to visit our school and help our students discover their passion for writing!

Photo Credits:
Background illustration adapted from Lullaby Raft, written by Naomi Shihab Nye
Cover Art by Vivienne Flesher
Simon and Schuster Children's Publishing, 1997
Portrait photograph of Naomi Shihab Nye
Photography by: Chehalis Hegner

Parent Book Club - Mindset

I have always enjoyed reading and now devote a lot of my reading time to educational blogs and books that expose me to various ideas and opportunities to improve education.  At some times, I feel like this can present some problems as we incorporate these ideas in our school without an awareness of why changes are being implemented throughout our parent community.  An example of this is some of the changes that have occurred in our school due to the work of Carol Dweck and her book “Mindset”.  I personally believe that the central idea of this book, promoting a growth mindset, has the ability to improve the learning experience for everyone in our school community.   Although our faculty has discussed Dweck’s work and how this can impact our classrooms, I was wondering how we could introduce our parent community to her work and discuss how parents can promote the growth mindset at home as well?

Fortunately, I have been working with a parent group this year to help me answer these types of questions.  Our solution was to have a parent book club that would read books like Mindset, and meet to discuss the central ideas and share how these ideas might impact their children.  I am happy to say that thanks to the organization of our parents, we will be having our first parent book club meeting this week and talking about how we can promote the growth mindset in both at home and at school.  I think that this is that this is a great example of a positive school and parent partnership and looking forward to some fantastic discussions.

Steven Farr - Teach for America

I remember reading an article in The Atlantic last year titled "What Makes a Great Teacher."   The article outlined the Steven Farr's role within Teach For America and highlighted a lot of the work that he has done to help identify the characteristics that TFA looks for when hiring teachers, and the methods that their best teachers employ in the classroom to help students learn.  To be honest, I was very interested to hear more about the practice that TFA has utilized to develop their framework and better understand how they have analyzed student data to identify which teachers they believe are great.

After almost 20 years in existence, TFA has developed some very complex structures to collect and analyze student data, but their definition of effectiveness is relatively simple.  They believe that effective teachers are those that create the most learning in their classrooms.  In order to identify where the most learning is taking place, they focus on standardized assessment data to ascertain how much growth has taken place during the time they are in a teacher's classroom.  Although he talked at great length about the imperfections of standardized data (various assessments, quality of test, alignment to standards), they have created a system to try and provide some consistency to the various testing tools that are used state by state.  At the end of the day, this analysis allows TFA to identify which teachers have caused the greatest gains, and they then study those teachers to try and find patterns in their methods to create their model of great teaching.

Personally, I really love the fact that TFA's model has been created by looking at exemplary practices in the classroom setting and that it is focused on student achievement (albeit a snapshot due to their exclusive use of standardized data).   Over the past few years, they have watched countless teachers and have found that the teachers who were able to create the most learning all did the following things.

• Set big goals
• Invest in students and their families
• Plan purposefully
• Execute effectively
• Continuously increase their effectiveness
• Work relentlessly

To be honest, I found this model to be really affirming as it is very similar to what we are hearing from other presenters in NESA, and directly related to what we have been working on as a faculty at ACS.  I also thought that the website that has been created by TFA is an amazing idea.  On the site, they have outlined their rubrics that have been created to describe the characteristics of great teaching, and attached a variety of resources to help teachers understand how they can improve in any of these areas.  Feel free to check this site out at www.teachingasleadership.org

Open Spaces

I am currently in Kathmandu at the NESA leadership conference and having a great time. NESA (Near East South Asian Schools) was created many years ago to provide professional development for overseas schools in our region and is led by an inspirational educator, David Chojnacki. At the opening address yesterday, David shared a poem with us to help us focus our efforts as we enter our weekend of sharing and learning. The poem, "Fire" by Judy Brown was a great catalyst and really made me stop and think a lot about how we can use professional development to re-ingnite our passion for education.

Fire - Judy Brown

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.

So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.


When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.


We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.
A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.

This poem made me think about a video by RSA Animate which describes Steven Johnson's latest book, "Where Good Ideas Come From." In his book, he asks, "what are the spaces that have historically led to unusual rates of creativity and innovation?" What he discovered is that there are recurring patterns throughout history that lead to the conditions necessary for innovation and creativity. In addition, he contends that innovation has historically increased as the amount of spaces to share ideas has increased. Fortunately for us, we exist in a period of time when the number of open spaces has exploded and many educators are using a wide variety of tools to collaborate and share strategies that will help to improve the learning of our students. The great news is that this method of collaboration can occur at any time and from anywhere, and its effects are exponential. The more people who take part, the more we will all be able to improve.

I know that many people attend conferences to take advantage of the open spaces that are provided to connect with colleagues and share ideas. This is a wonderful opportunity and I always return to school refreshed, reinvigorated and inspired. I also know that these conferences are not the only way for me to share ideas with other educators who are seeking innovative and creative strategies for our schools. As David said this morning, it is the open spaces that can re-ignite our flame or passion for learning. How amazing is it to realize that we have access to tools that allow us to share spaces and keep that fire burning on a daily basis?