Karyn's Professional Reading

Sunday, January 11, 2015

6 Paths to Better Leadership

Article

The 6 paths every leader needs to be able to follow:

1. Believe and Envision

2. Start Strong and Simple

3. Persuade and Inspire

4. Lead Morally

5. Demonstrate Courage and Compromise

6. Optimize Any Situation

Having a big picture vision is incredibly important to successful leadership.

It is important to inspire confidence as a leader.

Leaders need to be able to help others see the vision.

Leaders must be prepared to take risks, buck trends, show courage

Leadership isn't reserved for just administrators

Leaders must excel at situational mastery and emotional intelligence.

One need not be a principal to be a school leader. Leaders are those who step up to help their organizations succeed. They take a larger measure of responsibility for keeping track of the big picture.

What the leader can accomplish directly is limited, especially in large and complex educational settings. Hence, distributed leadership is essential for sustainability.

Why We Teach

Article

....successful teacher is one who places a high value on students' culture, race, language, gender, experiences, families and sense of self. These teachers sustain high expectations of all students, especially for those whom others may have given up on. They stay committed in spite of predictable obstacles and create a safe classroom haven for their students. By being resilient, by challenging the status quo of educational bureaucracy, and by viewing themselves as life-long learners, they come to care about, respect and love their students.

“To understand your own motivation to teach, you explore your own history of learning.”

Friday, January 9, 2015

Why Pre School Shouldn't Be Like School

Article

Interesting studies: reinforce the value student-led inquiry & the impact of teacher language

New research shows that teaching kids more and more, at ever-younger ages, may backfire.

Does direct teaching also make children less likely to draw new conclusions—or, put another way, does it make them less creative?

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

it's more important than ever to give children's remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies.

Sunday, January 4, 2015

Reflections and Resolutions- Claire Amos

Reflections and Resolutions

Like the concept of enabling constraints.

Sustainable agility- very cool to be working towards for us at TKAS as well.

Celebrating Success- What We Value Sally Hart

Blogpost

So many similarities to us. Very affirming. Some things we could look at adapting too.

Would like to see how we could adapt the ambassador idea into our student leadership plan.