I spend a lot of time thinking about my district’s evaluation system these days. As a first-year director of personnel, developing something new, meaningful, and usable is on my short list. After years of being evaluated by our current evaluation
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I recently led a professional development where I asked my participants to think about a classroom that they considered to be the ‘exemplar’ classroom. Many smiled and shared at their tables examples of teachers and classrooms where significant learning took
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Move On When Reading (MOWR) is a policy currently in effect with the intention of preparing students to be proficient readers by 3rd grade so they are properly prepared to enter 4th. This leads to the questions: What is so
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Pretty much every staff meeting, PLC meeting, and professional training in education starts by listing the norms by which participants should abide. The idea is keep the meeting focused and efficient. A typical list includes things like equity of voice, responsible
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Last spring, when 70,000 teachers flooded the Capitol to make five demands known, there were as many leaders as followers. Educators flexed the bullhorn, organized a band, wrote initiatives, arranged meetings with lawmakers, trained people to circulate petitions, set up
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Stop talking. It’s the best advice I’ve gotten this year and it hasn’t just been from one source. But it’s not just to stop talking, it’s to start really listening. We’re taught from a very young age that if we
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One lesson that I think all educators across the valley can agree with is that it is critical for us to stay informed and involved in our legislative process. I think we also learned that in order to do this,
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In 2016 a small band of physics teachers got together to address the problem of a rapidly dwindling supply of qualified physics teachers in the state of Arizona. This team took it upon themselves to go straight to the capitol
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There have been two Stories from School AZ blogs focused on principal leadership this year. Beth Maloney writes a beautiful letter about what support teachers are craving in Dear Principal and Jess Ledbetter uses poetic transcription in Administrators: Be the
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