Many school administrators, instructional coaches, and teacher leaders at this time are engaged in designing improvement plans or beginning the implementation of plans that were created earlier to achieve school and/or district goals. This process should be built to guarantee that educator learning is an outcome along with increased student learning. Educator learning is more […]

The title of a TEDxTalks video recently caught my attention: If you want to achieve your goals, don’t focus on them. Reggie Rivers illustrates that goals are of little value if they don’t lead to the identification and implementation of specific behaviors that will produce the desired goals. If I’m focused on the behaviors, the […]

I just finished a week working with administrators and coaches conducting observations of student learning throughout a school district K-12. Our focus all week was on identifying if student learning behaviors that we saw were the ones necessary for reaching the desired student learning outcomes. In many of the debriefings that we had I was […]

In recent weeks I have had the opportunity to conduct a substantial number of classroom observations with teams of instructional leaders and coaches. Our focus was on practicing observing student behaviors. In the “debriefs” we shared what we had observed. Where did we see behaviors that would suggest a strong likelihood that desired learning would […]

All of you who have been in my training sessions or coaching practices know the increase focus I have personally developed on “student behaviors”.  I believe that the real challenge in teaching is identifying what students need to do or experience that will create the learning outcomes we want. “Teaching my content” is very different […]

I had some free time during the holidays to work ahead in prepping for upcoming sessions that I’ll be facilitating in the new year. I’d been tagging and saving articles (read when you have time) in anticipation of a presentation at the Conference of Turkish Private Schools Association that is going to take place  7-9 […]