“It’s amazing how, when you condition yourself to have a grateful spirit, you will find yourself expressing gratitude and multiplying that feeling in your life.” Andy Andrews, The Seven Decisions     Last year, when we moved to Florida, I was dreading a 4-5 day drive that I was going to have to make from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Not because I don’t like road trips but because of the cargo I was carrying. My dogs! If you know anything about me, I love my dogs. They are my babies. That was the reason I was making the drive. I was not comfortable transporting them on a plane. My fear ..read more

I had been doing the same email format weekly for a few years. I focused on sharing three things every week: something profound (an idea or thought from someone else), something professional (a learning opportunity with me), and something personal (a way to learn more about me as a person). I loved the format, but over the first few months of 2023, I struggled to write it and felt I had lost inspiration. I felt I was filling blanks more than genuinely learning. So, instead of continuing, I decided that I was going to take a break from it. Not necessarily end the process, but take a step back a ..read more

One of the things that I enjoy about sharing these old posts I wrote in the past with you all is how I often stumble upon them. I originally wrote this post on the 4 Attributes of a Great Principal in 2013, and it was shared with me just this past week, over ten years after it was written. To think that I am re-reading something I forgot I had written in the first place is one of the reasons I love the blogging process. As I cleaned up the post below and reviewed the original points, I think they all still hold true today. I often joke that being an assistant principal was one of my favorite r ..read more

A few quick thoughts that I wanted to share with you… Last week, I wrote a post titled, “Don’t Ignore the 80%,” which focused on ensuring that you spend significant amounts of time on the people who want to improve and grow. (You can read the whole post here.) About a day after reading the post, I read this quote from the book, “Good Boss, Bad Boss” by Robert Sutton, which had me feeling validated on what I shared last week:     “Most bosses can’t place such energy suckers in splendid isolation. When you can’t avoid them, just work on not letting them get under your skin. I ..read more

You probably have heard of (even in passing) the 80-20 rule, otherwise known as the “Pareto Principle.” Here is the definition as shared on Wikipedia:     The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the “vital few”). Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few or the principle of factor sparsity.     In this article (and image below) from Investopedia,  it shares these insights:         The 80-20 rule maintains that 80% of out ..read more

Currently, I am working on a book with Allyson Apsey and several other great contributors titled “What Makes a Great Principal!” This is to be released in the Spring of 2024 (ish) and is a combination of hearing from former and current principals about effective practices, but most importantly, we have contributions from teachers and students, talking about their best principals and what those principals did to bring out the best in their staff.  It has been an exciting process, and I think this will be a unique “leadership book” as most of it is written by the people they served. We have ..read more

In this month’s revisit post, I look back at an article I originally wrote in 2018, looking at the idea of “best practice” and how it is initially built on innovation. “Best Practice” didn’t just originally come out of nowhere; it was once an innovation. Someone said, “The thing I am doing is not working for my students, so I am going to create something else.” That “something else” then saw success, became widely adopted, and then known as “best practice.” I share the following in the article and believe it still today:     Not every new idea works. But not every “best practice” wor ..read more

This is the final part (5) of this series on “Shifting to the Innovator’s Mindset,” and I will be discussing why the best challenges we can have in our lives are the ones we create for ourselves. Win or lose, fail or succeed, the process of the challenge is often better than the product. This thinking reminds me of the Demetri Martin image below:   “Image from Demetri Martin”   What I love about this image is that if you replace the word “success” with “learning,” the image can stay precisely the same:   It is essential to embrace and see the beauty in the messiness above. As ..read more

Last week, I posted the second part of this series on “Shifting to the Innovator’s Mindset” and discussed how we deal with obstacles in a way to get better. The focus of that post was going beyond going through something and learning to grow through adversity. Today, I wanted to share the third part of the series based on the image from “Innovate Inside the Box,” which is a build-on from the table shared in the book “The Growth Mindset Coach” by Annie Brock and Heather Hundley.     For the next five weeks (this is week 3), I will write a blog post and share a podcast with insights o ..read more

Last week, I posted the first of this series on “Shifting to the Innovator’s Mindset” focusing on how we look at effort in learning.  Today, I wanted to share the second part of the series that is based on the image from “Innovate Inside the Box” which is a build-on from the table shared in the book “The Growth Mindset Coach” by Annie Brock and Heather Hundley     For the next five weeks (this is week 2), I will write a blog post and share a podcast with insights on each “situation” and what it looks like when we move from a Growth Mindset to an Innovator’s Minds ..read more