Each year in November, we take time as a middle level school to emphasize the importance of gratitude. While we are an international school, we build off the American holiday of Thanksgiving as a foundation for celebrating recognition and thanks. Abundant research connects gratitude with a sense of purpose and happiness, and focusing on gratitude is an important way to help meet students’ social-emotional needs. (more…)
School of Thought Blog
Nurturing a Culture of Gratitude
Building CultureCollaborative LeadershipLeading LearningOtherPrincipal/Teacher PreparationReflection & GrowthWellness
Six Steps to Jump-Start Personalized Learning
As education continues to change, so does the way we teach and how our students learn. Instead of the teachers being the holder of all information, our students now have the resources to drive their own learning. Personalizing learning for students allows students greater opportunities to control their learning and search for what suits them, and my Virtual Tour event focuses on what personalized learning looks like at Mason High School. (more…)
Building CultureCommunicationCurriculum, Instruction, & AssessmentsLeading LearningRelationshipsResults-Orientation
Closing the Opportunity Gap in Rural Alaska
Chief Ivan Blunka School is a preK–12 school located in the Alaska bush community of New Stuyahok. In New Stuyahok, hunting, fishing, and subsisting off the land aren’t hobbies but a necessity for survival due to the lack of traditional economic opportunities. Our community is only accessible by air or boat, and even then only when the weather cooperates. Everything we need to run our school, from toilet paper to textbooks, is flown in via single-engine aircraft.
(more…)NASSP Presents 2019 Congressional Champion Award
As an organization, NASSP’s primary goal and vision is to have great leaders in every school committed to the success of each student. To achieve our mission, NASSP needs support from federal legislators who are willing to introduce, support, and pass legislation aimed at benefiting school leaders and the students and faculty in their schools. NASSP presents its Congressional Champion Award to policymakers who have gone above and beyond in supporting policies that support this vision and are making it a reality. Congressional Champion Award recipients have shown themselves to be exceptional allies of principals and public education during their tenure as elected officials. (more…)
Ways to Teach Resiliency
As I reflect on the years that I have been at Whaley School, we are graduating more students each year, we are offering more elective classes that tie into what students want to do after graduation, and our teachers are working hard to create amazing lessons in and out of the classroom—all things which help build resiliency in our students. (more…)
Principals Lead the Fight for a Diverse Teacher Workforce
Black students who have just one black teacher in elementary school are significantly more likely to graduate high school and attend college. Yet, the chances of a black student—or any student of color—having a teacher who looks like them are unacceptably slim. For high school principal Cory Cain, these numbers aren’t just a statistic, they were his reality. As a young black man growing up in Florida, Cory didn’t have a black teacher until his junior year of college. Now, as a principal, that experience is never far from his mind. He’s constantly thinking of new ways to recruit more people of color into education to ensure that his students benefit from a diverse faculty. During National Principals Month, Cory reflects on the key role principals can play in diversifying the teaching profession. (more…)
Building CultureCollaborative LeadershipEquityHuman Capital ManagementLeading Learningteacher quality
Principal, Parent, and Partner: The Balancing Act of a School Leader
When I was child, I always wanted to juggle like the showstoppers in the circus and on television. I mastered juggling two balls (not that impressive, I know) but when the third ball entered the mix, I couldn’t control it, and I looked like a clown in the worst sense of the word. As school leaders, we have to juggle all the time. We have our professional and personal roles, and sometimes we sacrifice one for the other, and that’s when everything starts crashing down. (more…)
Leading from the Heart, the Mind, and a Place of Stability
As school leaders, we often feel pulled in many different directions and it can be difficult to navigate where we should be leading from. We must be careful to stay grounded and lead from the right place—otherwise, as a line from my favorite musical goes, we could easily be like a ship blown from its mooring, adrift with plenty of work to do but no stability. (more…)
Assistant Principals: Strengthening The ‘Bench’ in School Leadership Pipelines
A National Board Certified Teacher, LaTanya Sothern, taught in Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland for 15 years. “I really felt I had more to offer as a leader,” she said during a Wallace Foundation podcast on school leadership. Serving as an instructional lead teacher gave Sothern “a little bit more training and a broader perspective” before she ultimately secured a position as an assistant principal. (more…)
Congratulations to the 2020 National Principal of the Year
Each year, the NASSP National Principal of the Year program recognizes outstanding middle level and high school principals who have made amazing contributions to their profession and to students’ learning. Kerensa Wing, principal of Collins Hill High School in Suwanee, GA, is the 2020 national winner. (more…)
Building CultureCollaborative LeadershipEquityHuman Capital ManagementInnovationLeading LearningOtherRecognition
Four Questions to Ask Teachers on Creativity
How do you lead and model creativity? That’s a question many school leaders ask themselves. Many of us can get our arms around collaboration, communication, and critical thinking, but why is it that creativity is one area where we frequently struggle and sputter? I think it’s because we fear creativity—it doesn’t fall into a nice box that is neatly packaged with structure and details. You see, creativity is often messy, frequently busting the seams of our comfort zones and almost always requiring us to stretch and grow. (more…)
A Roadmap for Implementing Standards-Based Grading
Fair, standards-referenced grading systems that communicate what a student knows and can do are often difficult to design. Developing grading systems that are fair and consistent across an entire school district can seem like an impossible task. However, it is a task that is necessary and worthwhile. (more…)
Make Your Voice Heard This National Principals Month
National Principals Month (NPM), celebrated annually throughout the month of October, highlights the hard work of principals across the country and all they do to support their educational communities. This year, the American Federation of School Administrators (AFSA), the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP), and the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) are taking that initiative a step further—calling attention to pressing issues facing the principalship and what policymakers can do to support principals and educators. (more…)
Collaborative LeadershipEducation PolicyLeading LearningOtherPrincipal pipelinePrincipal/Teacher Preparation
Leading Through the Struggle
We spend a great deal of time as school leaders talking about building culture. We often consider the day-to-day elements of this work: eating lunch with the kids, visiting classrooms, being visible at all kinds of school events, and having meaningful conversations with teachers and students. The work of leading a school and building a culture is much like leading a family, full of joy and, inevitably, pain. (more…)
Three Principles for Improving Practice
My school, long rated as top-performing, was this year given a rating of “targeted” for underperformance among student subgroups—including African-American, free and reduced-price lunch, and special education students. Though this is understandably not an ideal rating, I look at it as a blessing in disguise. We now have a very clear mandate to look at the performance of these subgroups and make immediate improvements. To me, this gives us an opportunity that will ultimately benefit all students, depending on the measures we put in place and the kinds of practices we implement. As an instructional leader, I am reminded that this work starts with me. (more…)
Announcing the 4th Quarterly Principal Advocate Champion
Every quarter, the NASSP Policy & Advocacy Center recognizes outstanding volunteer advocates who dedicate their time to advancing the policy and civic priorities of school leaders, public education, and students across America. The Principal Advocate Champion is someone who has made a powerful impact on the direction of public education policy through their personal engagement with state and federal policymakers and their ability to organize grassroots support behind NASSP advocacy initiatives. (more…)
Inspiring Visionary Leadership at the AZ State Summit
State Summits offer National Honor Society (NHS) and National Junior Honor Society (NJHS) members hands-on experiential leadership development. They are designed to unlock the potential of participating students by providing a shared space to learn, grow, and explore ideas together. We asked students to provide their own report of the Arizona State Summit, which took place on September 12, 2019. This is the third in a series of three firsthand blog post accounts. The first two accounts can be found here and here. (more…)
Learning From My Daughter: Unfiltered Feedback
Over the past three years, I have had an amazing opportunity to view my school in a different way as the principal to my daughter, Sidney. As you might expect, I think that she is a pretty amazing young lady, and I eagerly anticipated her sixth-grade year at Messalonskee Middle School (MMS). Before she started, Chuck Pullen, the tech education teacher at our school, told me that I would never look at MMS in the same way after she attended. How right he was! I have had hundreds of conversations about school with Sidney, and through those discussions, I have come to see MMS through her lens. (more…)
What Drives You?
State Summits offer National Honor Society (NHS) and National Junior Honor Society (NJHS) members hands-on experiential leadership development. They are designed to unlock the potential of participating students by providing a shared space to learn, grow, and explore ideas together. We asked students to provide their own report of the Arizona State Summit, which took place on September 12, 2019. This is the second in a series of three firsthand blog post accounts. The first account can be found here. (more…)
Character Champions: Teacher Leadership to Address Social and Emotional Needs
Over the past couple of years, our school has been challenged by the social and emotional needs of our students. The impact of increased behavioral incidents has put a strain on our previously steady school climate, and while we are learning a lot, we have also found that we are not very well prepared to handle some of these needs. In an attempt to foster real teacher leadership in addressing these challenges, I had to step aside and allow the energies and passions of our staff to take shape. (more…)