Working At The Edge

Make School Different: Digital leadership & Transformation

Are your interactions on social media shallow?

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I challenge you to take a moment to become self aware about your social media habits. Will you approach this challenge with a growth mindset? I’ve shared my thoughts previously about the lack of depth in interactions on social media here, here and here. I guess we’ll make this number four…. I’m currently reading Cal […]

4 Steps to Break Free from the Shallow Work of School Leadership

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Email. Endless email. Phone calls. Texts. State-driven initiatives such as “educator effectiveness,” assessment, new standards, grant applications, data verification and reporting. Meetings. Too many unfocused, unnecessary meetings. Does this look and sound like your world as a school leader? Enter Cal Newport’s newest book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Education […]

Give Up or Lead Up?

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In an earlier post titled How do we make our schools amazing places for learners?, I concluded the post with this question: If you’re not the top leadership in your school or district, how do you lead up? You have great ideas to help make your school an amazing place for learning, but you find […]

My #oneword2016 – #DO

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Do. A small but mighty word with the potential for lots of nuance around it. It’s one of the things that makes being a practitioner so incredible – we get to do the work. There are a lot of people who want to tell us what to do. They are thinkers who can often have […]

Making Action Research Work

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In last week’s post, we started to explore the idea of teachers and leaders as researchers of practice. We learned that educational practitioners have a unique insider perspective and should make research a part of the work. In this week’s post we’ll focus on a five step process you can follow to study, improve and innovate […]

4 Reasons Why Practitioners Should Be Researchers

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As teachers and leaders, we don’t often think of ourselves as “researchers.” After all, when we think of research, we think of academic outsiders studying borderline interesting topics and writing long, confusing reports about their discoveries. We don’t typically think of practitioners as doing the work of “researchers.” It shouldn’t be that way. We need […]