Getting Unstuck: Aligning Changes to the Vision to Bring About Student Success

“If you look at the workforce skills that we want to get students ready for now and over the next five years, if you look at a list of the top 10 words, you will never see the word ‘compliant.’ Instead, you’re going to see ‘creativity,’ ‘collaboration,’ ‘problem solving,’ and ‘community relations.’”
— Evan

Today on Getting Unstuck

For the past few weeks, we’ve been focusing on answering a single question: How might we reimagine schools to better support our kids for the world today? Today, we welcome a highly qualified voice to the discussion, Evan Robb. Evan is a TEDx speaker, author of the ever-popular The Ten Minute Principal, and perhaps most important, the veteran principal of Johnson-Williams Middle School in Berryville, Virginia.

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Evan’s school transformation ideas

  1. To meet all students’s needs, instruction has to be authentic, varied and tiered.

  2. Have choice opportunities for kids that allow them to explore, learn and express their learning in different kinds of ways.

  3. The art of teaching helps kids demonstrate understanding by applying knowledge in new ways and then creating new information.

  4. Innovation will grow where the principal has created an environment for innovation, which includes

    • the leader demonstrating attempts to be innovative

    • accepting mistakes or failure as part of the learning process

    • noting and celebrating attempts at innovation

  5. Create and articulate your vision – what we want to build and achieve on behalf of our kids – and then hire people who are aligned with it.

  6. Allow students to redo or retake work to demonstrate full understanding and then get full credit for it.

  7. As the leader, put time in areas that bring the most impact for what you want to accomplish in your leadership role.

We’re pleased to announce …

…that our book Shifting: How School Leaders Can Create a Culture of Change is now available from Corwin Press or Amazon. You can preview the book by watching the short video below.

From our publisher

In Shifting, educators and leadership experts Kirsten Richert, Jeff Ikler and Margaret Zacchei empower educational change leaders to proactively and coherently navigate complex change in schools to achieve the desired outcomes.

Using a three-part framework—Assess, Ready, Change—this book leads educators to examine a school’s imperatives and readiness for change, identity the tools and abilities required to manifest change, and take action by defining the roles and processes necessary to effectively implement both sweeping change and smaller day-to-day adjustments.

Jeff Ikler