Archive
component:how.climate-and-culture
Fortified Environments Turnaround Impacts of Poverty
Dr. Pamela Cantor, Turnaround CEO, believes it is becoming clear in research and practice that mindsets and self regulation “are both highly malleable and responsive to positive influences, including well designed classrooms, the most powerful of which include meaningful connections with adults.”
Good Work: Inhabited By a Question
For 35 years, Roger Weissberg has been inhabited by a question: How do schools, parents, and communities come together to promote positive behavioral outcomes in young people? CASEL launched the Collaborating Districts Initiative aimed at supporting district-wide SEL efforts in Anchorage, Austin, Chicago, Cleveland, Nashville, Oakland, Reno, and Sacramento. Each district is improving SEL leadership, strengthen instruction, and building a culture connections and continuous improvement.
How Active, Digital Learning Fosters Business Skills in Students
The array of social technologies open a wide swath of possibilities for active learning, particularly in the online and blended teaching space.
It’s All About Culture at Acton Academy
From the moment you arrive at Acton Academy in Austin, Texas you can tell this school is different. Culture oozes from every ounce of the staff and students. By 8:00am students are lining up to run into their classrooms even though school does not start until 8:30am.
How Children Succeed: Attachment, Advisory & Adversity
Paul Tough takes on the enormous question of How Children Succeed in his new book. In a well-produced long interview with Ira Glass, Tough said, "We don't teach the most important skills," a list that includes "persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence."
4 Ways to Empower Students Through Collaboration
If you want students to collaborate it is imperative that educators establish this as a norm at the beginning of the school year. Great teachers leverage group work and collaborative activities and projects in their curriculum and instruction, but oftentimes teachers “push-back” with the difficulties of having their students collaborate. I agree, it is a daunting task, but I always respond, “How have you taught them to collaborate and providing scaffolding of that skill?” This is the key! If you want your students to collaborate effectively, you must give the opportunity to do so, as well as give the necessary instruction in skills and scaffolding.
Good Work: Sweat the Small Stuff
Culture is the unwritten rules for how things work and how people treat each other. It’s a function of all the little stuff: the stories people tell, how decisions are made and communicated, where people sit and park, and how contribution is recognized. An award winning principal taught me that while trying to accomplish big things you need to sweat the small stuff.
Good Work: Frantic Learner
Think about all of the new things you have learned in the last year – it is probably an amazing list. Keep a journal (or write a blog) of weekly observations and what you learned from each experience. When you focus your awareness, learning jumps out at you from a variety of sources. Find out what you should be learning for this job and the next, not just for survival, but for the joy in learning, in connecting two different subjects, in mastering a new skill, in growing as a parent.
Good Work: Bureaucracy Busting Starts With a Positive Presupposition
I watched Rhode Island Commissioner Deb Gist in action yesterday, first on television answering tough questions from a panel of reporters then speaking to and interacting with a conference of educators. She is struggling with the limitations of an old bureaucracy while helping her colleagues invent the future. She set’s the vision, outlines the challenges, encourages collaboration, and does it all with unusual grace and charm. It looks like her positive presupposition has earned the benefit of the doubt.