http://www.museumofdesign.org/film-festival/
MODA Film Festival, February 7-9, @modatl
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If time is money, then how are you investing yours as a school leader?
Time is money.
Over my lifetime, I’ve heard that phrase countless times. As a teacher in the field of economics, I certainly tried to help student learners see the power of time in their investments and savings.
To oversimplify things, you can approach monetary saving and investing from one of two approaches. As you get your paycheck:
- you can instantly commit a certain dollar amount or percentage to savings and investments, before you ever spend a dime on any other living expenses; or
- you can spend, spend, spend and wait until the end of the month to see how much you have left over for savings and investments.
Which approach do you think actually ends up with more deposits in the bank?
So, if time is (like) money, then how are you investing your time as a school leader?
Do you earmark certain amounts or percentages of time to the big investments you want to make for the long-term development of your school? And do you instantly “pay your calendar” those savings and investments, so that you know time will be devoted to those all-too-important accounts?
Or do you spend your time on all of the things that happen to come your way, only to realize at the end of a week or month that you don’t have a lot (of time) left for the critical investments for the future of your school?
A Case Study of Time Investment: Me
For about five years, I’ve disciplined myself to create what I call a “scheduling paradigm.” It’s one way that I take my monthly time paycheck and make my saving-and-investment commitments first. In past years, I’ve written about this under titles such as “Big Rocks First.”
This year, much of my first semester at Mount Vernon was devoted to an advanced ethnography plan. (That needs to be an entire other set of leadership-practice posts!) Now that I’m shifting into another phase of my work, I used a number of insights from the observations and engagements first semester to build a prototype of my second semester scheduling paradigm.
As part of the prototype testing, I sent the following email to about ten colleagues for feedback:
Dear All:
I’d really appreciate some feedback, coaching and advice from you all. I hope it will take 10 minutes or less.
I’ve attached version one of my scheduling paradigm, and I would so appreciate your eye on it. It reflects some of what I learned S1, as well as what I anticipate in S2.
- What regularly scheduled happenings in your division/department do you want/need me a part of?
- If you were me, how would you spend your time – what would you focus on and prioritize?
- What do you expect from me – from your CLIO – that I might not yet be delivering on? What do you want me to keep/continue doing?
Creating a paradigm like this is a relatively long-standing practice of mine. (You can read about it here, if you are interested.) By no means does this rigidly lock me into a predetermined schedule. Rather it helps me make sure that I intentionally create space for importance. The current schedule does not reflect the impromptu talks, the project work like ATLK12DC, MVIFI & fuse14, iDiploma, etc. that we know will be a part of S2.
Thank you! I want to ensure I am serving you and the school best!
Bo
Part of my decision to seek feedback was influenced by a recent leadership podcast from Andy Stanley (hat tip to Shelley Clifford). The November and December episodes focused on “The Art of Inviting Feedback,” and Stanley’s suggestion to ask, “If you were me, what would you do?” seemed a perfect combination with my developing habit of creating a scheduling paradigm.
Well, the feedback has been amazing. Seven of the ten colleagues have provided me with very specific information about what to continue, what to add or change, and what I might drop. Earlier this week, I met with two of my co-leaders who had also created similar scheduling paradigms for themselves, and we were able to trade notes and exchange ideas about what we saw and how our time investments might synergize and complement each other’s plans.
Now, it’s time to ship the idea – something akin to an MVP (minimum viable product) – and learn from the actual commitment to the time investments.
As a school and education leader that looks for wisdom in the practice of other school and education leaders – and leaders from multiple industries, sectors, and walks of life – I thought I would share my own practice here. If any of you find even a smidgen of wisdom in the idea, then I hope you’ll make it your own and make it better. I don’t much care for the verb we often use in educational leadership – “steal.” We often hear educators say, “Oh, I like that. May I steal that idea?” Well, I offer this one freely. And I hope you’ll let me know if you have a practice that works for you in terms of devoting intentional time to the investments that matter most in our schools.
As for me, I’ve learned that time can get away from us as school leaders. So, I set aside a portion of my time paycheck at the beginning to ensure that my long-term accounts are deposited with savings and investments first.
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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A Taxonomy of Innovation – Harvard Business Review
[HT @meghancureton] Seen this? Could be useful for #ATLk12dt and it’s cool! http://t.co/ydopTlFTrg @scitechyEDU @boadams1
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A Short Memory is Best For Innovation – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat
“In order to innovate, you need to let go by having a “short memory”: create, then release. Dwelling on the past prevents you from moving forward. While you should carry with you the lessons you’ve learned, you shouldn’t let them define your current project.”
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Great resource bank from HASTAC on badge systems and microcredentialing.
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One Simple Practice That Will Revolutionize Your Career | Accidental Creative
“Cultivating a deep well of stimuli from which to cull insights and apply them to your work is one of the most effective methods I’ve encountered for setting yourself up to thrive in the create on demand world.”
Provides some pointers for developing a “daily study,” or what I call my personal learning plan (the morning part)… https://itsaboutlearning.wordpress.com/plp/
[HT @tara_supersub – a former student who quickly became one of my teachers.]
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Find the Coaching in Criticism – Harvard Business Review
An excellent piece on the 3 triggers that feedback can touch, and an outstanding summary of 6 steps to becoming a better receiver of feedback,
[HT @chiphouston1976 and @nicolenmartin]
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Feedback is crucial. That’s obvious: It improves performance, develops talent, aligns expectations, solves problems, guides promotion and pay, and boosts the bottom line.
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But it’s equally obvious that in many organizations, feedback doesn’t work.
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Most companies try to address these problems by training leaders to give feedback more effectively and more often. That’s fine as far as it goes; everyone benefits when managers are better communicators. But improving the skills of the feedback giver won’t accomplish much if the receiver isn’t able to absorb what is said. It is the receiver who controls whether feedback is let in or kept out, who has to make sense of what he or she is hearing, and who decides whether or not to change. People need to stop treating feedback only as something that must be pushed and instead improve their ability to pull.
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The Eight Characteristics Of Effective School Leaders – Forbes
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Laura Eddolls – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat
So many lessons here…
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Do you think you need to be multidisciplinary in order to be successful as a creative professional?
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I think being a relaxed person and having a relaxed style is comforting and attractive to other people. I don’t like formality, and I don’t think many people do, so I avoid it to a certain extent.
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the curation/incubation of many creative ideas is crucial in order to innovate; others have also suggested that over-saturation of ideas is detrimental to original thought.
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You continuously have to be aware of your surroundings and who is doing what.
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why I always blog about my mistakes and what I learn, because I want people to learn from me as I’ve had the chance to learn from others.
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The Benefits of Experience | LinkedIn
HMW build more experience into school-based learning?
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The Online Education Revolution Drifts Off Course : NPR
An interesting and important provocation about the first iterations of MOOCs and how online education is learning from the critical core/corp of relationship-based learning.
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Transforming Education: The One Thing I’d Change in 2014 | Edutopia
“Learning to listen doesn’t mean that we stop all other work. It doesn’t mean that the principal ceases to lead from a collaboratively built, living vision; it doesn’t mean that teachers stop offering challenging texts or allow their classrooms to become unruly. It would mean that we’d pay much more attention to how we communicate with each other, to how we listen to each other.
Authentic dialogue could lead to stronger communities, to deeper understandings across difference, and to finding creative solutions to the problems that exist in our schools and country. That’s my hope for 2014: that we learn how to slow down, listen, and effectively communicate with each other.”
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“Feynman, eloquent and enthralling as ever, illustrates the connectedness of everything to everything else”
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If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it!
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SpeEdChange: Seven Pathways to a New Teacher Professionalism
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What does learning look like? What do learning spaces look like? What questions do humans ask in learning spaces?
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“So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for.”
If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for.
Richard Feynman, as shared on Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings
Snow and ice days cause wailing and gnashing of teeth in School 3.0
As I breezed the Twitter stream awhile today, I noticed a number of people from various reaches of the United States hailing that their school had already been announced CLOSED on Jan. 6 due to inclement weather – snow and ice!
Just one example:
Well well my former Michigan co-workers already have school closed for tomorrow. They r deep n snow! Their bragging has begun lol [emphasis mine]
Like you maybe, I’ve heard about strange rituals like children wearing pajamas inside out and flushing ice cubes down the toilet to encourage the elements to delay or cancel school.
So, of course, I cannot help but wonder:
What would make school so great as a learning-and-engagement community that teachers and students would actually be sad, devastated even, when school was canceled for inclement weather?
We should design for that emotion! For that desired user experience!
And if school canceled simply provides more time for people to do other things that get neglected “due to” their professional/school lives – hence the excitement about the cancelation, then we could learn from those insights, too! But I imagine that’s not all that’s at stake. How ’bout you?!
[Selfish blogger’s note: I so wish hundreds…thousands of people would fill the comments with examples of what school would/could be like that would make them sad if it got canceled due to weather. And then I wish we would make those schools happen more!]
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