The Shameless Art of Self Promotion For Schools

We need to do a much better job of self promotion or we will be run over by our own failures and lack of progress. Let’s face it. Common sense would tell anyone that no school is perfect. In fact, by nature of the school improvement process, we honed our knives of self improvement by becoming very, very good at self criticism, and ultimately it is also deemed cathartic to announce our own weak points out loud and with robust vigor and valor. Such announcements like,

“Our school has progressed just 10 percentage points on the nationally normed test in the past three years, missing our target by 2 percentage points. We are disappointed in missing our target despite the tremendous progress we have made.”

The newspapers and online networks out there are all over this stuff, and the fuel for the school critics’ fire is among the worst in journalism falling just short of the criticisms and interrogations meted out on Meet the Press and Jerry Springer combined! Sigh… why do schools insist on focusing on the negatives? Must we be so self critical? Is it a deeply held community expectation that we be negative about ourselves? Would be appear to be a cover up if we instead said,

“The progress that our school has made in the past three years equates to 10 percentage points, and has moved our school to within 2 percentage points of our target. The school will reevaluate their academic targets and continue with our aggressive school improvement progress to ensure our students continued success

Much nicer if you ask me. Alas… things do go bad in schools sometimes and black and white honesty is the best policy for sure. We seemed to have our share of them lately, and sadly some are really out of our control, although that is NOT the message a school administrator wants to send. To take responsibility and not being able to truly implement mitigating steps is certainly frustrating. I won’t make the laundry list of things that go awry, as I suspect you have two or three on your mind right now. Instead let’s turn this coin over and I propose some positive communications that will rebuild the interest and confidence in the school. George Pawlas college professor and author of The Administrator's Guide to School-Community Relations states that administrators should have 6 things that they can brag about their school at any given moment. He states in a 2005 Education World interview that,

Having a list of six things you can say with pride about your school can serve a principal in many ways. As new parents come to visit your school to see if it meets their expectations, those six pride statements can be great conversation starters. I had committed my six statements to memory but, if it's helpful, I recommend carrying an index card with the six statements on it. When you are at meetings of civic and community groups, that card will come in handy when community members ask about your school. The more you use those statements, the easier it is to recall them when the time is right.

Taking the old motto “Ten to glow on, one to grow on”, I figure that we must provide 10 or more quality examples of positive results in our schools to counter balance the single quality result. Guiding factors for these include:

• Always tell the truth. (This should be easy)
• Do not exaggerate. (This is harder than you think)
• Make the message understandable. (This is the hardest thing to do!)
• Recognize your experts. Show them off to your community. Quote them frequently.
• Any school event or school personnel recognized by an independent source (i.e. newspaper, professional organization) should be published and republished. Theses events and people should be your poster children.
• Focus on direct implementation steps taken by the school, and not just mere happenstance occurrences.
• Student learning data must be targeted and not over generalized
• Over reliance regarding co-curricular (sports, after school, clubs, etc) for positives should be avoided.
• Concrete, real life celebrations of school events connected to learning are most efficient.
• Be visible with your positives and the positives will make your visibility less negative even when bad things happen.

I just finished with an article about online learning community at our school. The article will hopefully be placed in our weekly parent communications bulletin this week, and will highlight some of the good stuff we are doing. I am focusing not on the delivery our programs but on the results of our strong and effective work. This article will be a first in a series and I am planning on going out and reviewing blogs, wikis and websites around our organization. I think we need a few more positives, and I think that if I start taking a look at this work and publicizing it, we will see results being our focus in stead of our lack thereof.

I would appreciate you comments and suggestions.

1994....

24.... one of my favorite shows! With the lack of quality television here in China, I now enjoy boxed sets of shows here, and '24' is no exception.

Then I saw this yesterday and had to point out the changes we have experienced through the last 13+ years. This goes for life, loves, careers, technology, and sadly the reality of terrorism. Granted... Al Quaeda was not even a word we understood in '94. Terrorism was something that happenned only in the Middle East, but the realities of world espionage, spys and war still were 3D realities to all of us.

So... trying not to be too heavy here..... take an amusing look back to what '24' would look like in '94.

Tech Best-Guesses

It has been a long time since I have written to this blog and much of it has to do with transitions and my life. Alas, time flies when you are having fun (or so they say), but time also flies when one is too busy to rest and take care of oneself as well. The latter is my case in the last few months of the school year (April and May) when I dropped off the grid and was working day to day to make it through. I am still standing and now have a new job with different responsibilities. Each day is a new adventure and that is good for my mental health. Ultimately, and deep down I have that sense of commitment and focus that I feel have lacked during the past academic year, probably much to having myself spread too thin and not getting to be as effective as I was with a single focus. Thus I am back to blogging.... AND I am getting sick and tired of my wife being better at blogging and showing off children for me!! Oh... and if you want to see what I am talking about click here!

Worse yet... my MOTHER has a blog with tons of readers! You can check this out here!

I thought of changing the name of this blog to “Sentiments on a turning stomach”, in that I have decided to write this note in a van as I ride between the Pudong and Puxi campuses. A little carsickness never killed anyone. Well, I hope not, so I will choke back the road chuck and and write on. It makes the ride go so much faster too.

Today, as is most days was a bit of rush, as it always is with a good meeting with my technology education colleagues and our IT director around the development of our technology plan. Mr. Jeff Utecht and Mr. Don Miron sat down with Mr. Orion Weber and me to talk about the direction of our school’s technology work and about where we might be going with a proposed one to one computing program. The discussion was lively, open and honest. It was challenging and frustrating too in that we are in a position right now to say no more often than to say yes… NOT my favorite place to be, but a role that someone must play.

Common sense would tell you a three year tech plan is really just a one year tech plan with a plan to review your “tech best-guesses” annually. If you do a little searching on the web you will find that there are many tech plans posted on the web and if they are more than one year old they really miss the mark. How do we move from being in a mode of planning and move to implementation in a landscape that is always changing?

Speaking of changing scenery…

Thanks to Karl Fisch for pointing out to us Shanghai residents that our city is one of the fastest developing landscapes (cityscapes… megalopolises??) in the world.

The most dynamic metropolis in the world’s most populous country numbs me with extremes: It’s a single city with more skyscrapers than the entire U.S. West Coast. In Shanghai, a new building of 30 stories or more has been completed every 12 days for the last six years. (At 1,375 feet, the Jin Mao Tower is soon to be dwarfed by the chisel-shaped, 101-story World Financial Centre, which should be the world’s tallest building when it’s completed in 2008.) From the United Airlines Hemispheres Magazine, October 2007 issue, p. 68.

With that many skyscrapers and cranes- I see 6 cranes out my van window right now- the changes we are feeling and seeing are much like the changes in technology we are seeing in the world.

Unofficial word from the US consulate (this is third hand information… so take it for what it’s worth) is that Shanghai is now around 22 million people.

Photo Credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lifemagic/446410824/, http://farm1.static.flickr.com/55/137523747_5e7b054727.jpg?v=0

TV Turn Off Week?? Does this mean no news for me?

This weeks is the newly renamed TV turnoff week.. ahem.. excuse me... "SCREEN AWARENESS WEEK".

I took a few minutes this afternoon and recorded a public service style podcast with a first grader giving a few examples of what families and students can do when they are not watching TV or playing video games. I personally think my family has a nice balance and we get to watch our usuals, (American Idol, an occasional Simpson episode and our favorite... Lonely Planet Traveler and cooking shows). In typical digital native fashion we surf the web, catch up on our blogs and watch a movie or TV show without a blink of an eye. Despite my age (a whopping 42 years), my mind has remained just flexible enough to do 4 things at once and I think it will mark the beginning of the end when I cannot keep up with my "slightly" younger wife.

My much younger colleague and friend Jeff Utecht has been dragged into the "Screen Awareness week" by his lovely wife Daneah Galloway. Daneah is one of the counselors at my school and she left a great post for him on HIS blog, The Thinking Stick.


She writes:

"For those of you who are regular readers of The Thinking Stick, I offer my condolences. For the week of April 23rd-29th, Jeff Utecht will be unavailable to post any articles, respond to any inquiries, or leave any comments on your own blogs. This is due to his VOLUNTARY (well almost) participation in the annual “TURNOFF WEEK”where we take control of the power screens have in our lives. Jeff will be attempting to evaluate (along with thousands of other people and students from around the world) the amount of time he spends on activities involving a screen.

During this week, I would encourage you to do much the same. Take a break from your televisions, computers, and handhelds…take a break from screens and spend time exploring your life. Minimize your screen time for just seven days and maximize quality time with loved ones. Reevaluate your priorities. Just be."

Common sense tells us that "work" does not count on this week. We "get to" use computers and "screens" to do our work, but we are not allowed to have any "fun" with the "screens". Boy, oh boy, did that set me off with a few choice things to says this morning.

I gave the following excuses as to why I would use screens (tonight) and not feel a bit guilty about it:

1. My work is like play (mostly) so it does not count.

2. My screen time is related to learning and personal improvement, thus it does not count.

3. I live in the PRC and I need to access news outside of this place, otherwise I do not know what is going on.

4. I want to and "plllllllllllllllllzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz" on you.

I think that number 1-3 work just fine. Number 4 is a bit suspect, but after having an elementary counselor shake her head no for 10 minutes straight at you while rolling her eyes, you would be giving her the biggest administrative raspberry too!

So what's my point? I think that this screen awareness week has hit the mark with me. No, I have not given up the small screen sitting on my lap. I have just been even more aware of the power it has to facilitate my learning, give me access to a world out of my reach and help me keep active, alive and learning. For you poor slobs (oops... it is also No Name Calling Week in our middle school)... nice, but mislead people who just find themselves sitting in front of the 72 inch plasma screen watching some inane and ridiculous slop (like American Idol... poor Sanjaya, forever to be a Tiger Beat Reject) without being involved in the world of the web. Well.... good luck.

So tonight... my lovely wife and I sit LISTENING to our music on our iPod, she's correcting math papers and me catching up on my blogs and writing to you. My brain engaged. This was preceded by a family cooking adventure of Peanut Butter Cookies (NOT on my diet, but who gives a rip on Screen Awareness week), and we all reading a couple of kid books before putting the 3 year old down for the night. When I got home, my daughter (she's THREE) explained in no uncertain terms that her teacher told her that we were NOT to watch TV. We were told, and we followed our directions.

Thanks Daneah and Madeline. I hope we last the week... albeit in our own way.

Technorati Tags: Screen Awareness Week, TV Turn-off Week, The Thinking Stick, Peanut Butter Cookies

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Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, Meaning

If you haven't read A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink, I really think you should.

Why you ask? Well, in education circles the words in the title of post will become (I am predicting here) part of our professional language, as each points to an area of where our careers/businesses, and our intelligence and our educational system will collide with an ever flattening world. The thing that Mr. Pink does so well is that he summarizes a body of research with understandable story telling. If you have not downloaded his lecture (available on iTunes), you really should. It is worth the download.

Think:Lab pointed me to this mind map created by Phil Chambers. Phil does a nice job of capturing the larger points of the book and I will use this diagram to talk about A Whole New Mind using this over the next couple of months.

What you really need to learn.

In my wanderings around the web I found a great article titled 10 things that everyone needs to learn by Steven Downes. You have to read this article as it is a nice summary and spin off from another piece done by Guy Kawasaki this last fall. Guy who writes for Signum sine tinnitu and several magazine did a piece with a similar title but much different content. Both are dated in the blogsphere in that they were written last fall... that's equivalent to our years.

We just finished with student-led conferences at our school and we asked that students be heavily involved in their own assessment. I keep talking to them about what they really need to know to be successful in life, and those who are paying attention and engage me in this conversation often hit the nail right on the head. Mr. Dowes #1 is "How to predict consequences". Mr. Kawasaki's #1 is "How to talk to your boss".

Common sense would tell you both are important. My question is how do we teach kids how to do either?

Readers of News on the Web: Not Short on Attention

Here is one for you brought to attention by my friends at U-Tech Tips! :

“Web news readers have greater attention span: study says”

You have to laugh! Don’t you?

I did a workshop last week with rousing crowd of four parents on how to use a new aggregator to collect, and read news from the choice stories available on the web. In each of the three sessions one of the attendees asked me “how much time do you spend reading blogs and news each day. I am very busy and don’t probably have the time that you do.”

Common sense would tell you that a principal of two schools with over 700 students, a father, husband and soon-to-be deputy superintendent is a pretty busy guy. “Spare time” is a commodity that I exploit to its fullest because I have so little of it. Thus , you can figure out the reason why I don’t have too many recent entries on this blog! Without a news aggregator and me continuing to collect feeds from news sources, blogs and professional journals, I would be hopelessly lost on current events, professional news and what my colleagues are doing out there in the “real” world. I would guess that the only real time I would get to “read” would be on my morning jaunts to the john!

As it is the RSS feeds that I have keep me informed and I can read them on the fly as I wait for meetings to start, when I am BORED in meetings when people are talking about things that do not apply to me, and when I am sitting in my cozy chair at home in the evenings enjoying a glass of wine or tea and winding down. My “newspaper” is my laptop and I can keep up with the world using the sources I want when I want them.

The great news for me is that in this study, I am purportedly reading more content that those poor folks stuck to traditional news sources. Granted, I still miss that 7 pound paper on my lap on a Sunday morning, but that is just the way it goes. My lap top is always available and doesn’t get damp and drippy on the front door step unless I really lose my cool and put it out there after an annoying email!

Technorati Tags: Attention Spans, aggregators, RSS Feeds, redefining literacy