Tips and Tricks and Make Your List!

By a show of hands, who's ready for the sale this weekend? I am quite positively not ready, and will spend the rest of this afternoon making my list and checking it twice. Before I get to that, I wanted to share some tips and tricks I picked up at my post-grad classes over the past two weeks.

The cool thing about these classes is that they're all taught by practicing superintendents or principals, so you really get a sense for current issues in the field. This is already much better than my Master's program, where my professors (although I loved them) were mostly theorists. Anyway, here's what they had to say:

On Common Core and PARCC

1. Use the ELA and Math standards in the science and social studies classroom- applying the standards in a cross curricular sense will build a more college and career ready student.

2. Informational text is not more important than literary text, it is just as important. Our students do not grow up reading newspapers or online journals, which is what they will be expected to read in college and careers, so they need to have exposure to it.

3. PARCC will require students to be able to drag and drop and type a paragraph to a page in a certain amount of time- consider including that as a center.

4. If your school hasn't started thinking about CCSS, don't start in 12th grade and don't start in 4th grade- start in Kinder and make sure that the Kinder teachers do it right, then move up to first grade- move progressively up with those students. Because then you will build a ladder of college and career ready students.

On Human Relations

1. There are 4 types of people in the world: Perfectionists (yours truly), Directors, Influencers, and Stabilizers. Once you know what you are, you can figure out the people around you and decide how best to interact. Copyright Denise Hecht 1996.

On Leadership and Management
1. Is your school a think tank? Is your department a think tank? Should it be?
2. As an administrator, consider making a checklist of questions to track tenure each year- ask them of every candidate who is up for re-hire and tenure.
3. When you are considering a difficult decision, ask "why" 5 times to get to the deepest answer.

On Communication
1. Never confuse a memo with reality- sending an email does not change behavior.
2. Ask for feedback regarding a change, rather than asking for opinions. "What are the pros and cons of ordering iPads for preschoolers?" not "What do you think about ordering iPads for preschoolers?"
3. Determine a brand for communication and follow through. If you have only one method of getting word out, Twitter, blog, facebook, newsletter, it doesn't matter as long as it's effective and reaches your audience.

I hope that was a useful synopsis of my two weeks in classes! On to my wish-list! (P.S. My store is on sale Saturday through Tuesday!)