Transformative Principal

Welcome to flashback Friday on the transformative principle podcast. I've been doing this podcast for almost 11 years. Crazy. I've released over 700 episodes on this podcast feed. There's a whole bunch of shows that you've probably never even heard. There's so much good stuff in here. So what I'm going to do over the next few weeks, probably for a while, is release a show on Friday that is a flashback to something previous. Hopefully. If I'm organized enough, I can tell you why I think this show is still relevant today, but to be honest, my shows stand for themselves because they're already. Amazing. So I hope you enjoy this. Let me know your feedback. I'm at Jethro Jones on all the socials would love to hear what you think. Today's flashback Friday. We are checking out episode 100 of transformative principle. I recorded this in 2015, so this has been a long time ago. And let me just say, looking back at it now, we were doing some pretty cool stuff. And Kodiak middle school when I was there. And this was a precursor to me winning the national digital principle of the year from national association of secondary school principals. And looking back at this episode, I can see why. Here are a few things that we did that you're going to hear about in this episode. Number one, we created an app for our students to get RTI time response to intervention time for additional support. We originally had the students in language arts for 90 minutes every day, and we're able to adjust that for them to get a 45 minutes. Unless they needed the time and then they got the 90 minutes. We also created some foundations classes for students to who were struggling and our results from those classes were amazing. We had kids going up in their scores two to three, four grade levels. Sometimes it was awesome. The things we did were so cool and so much fun. And I just love that we got to do it. It was really cool. So there's a lot of great stuff in this. Make sure you check out the videos of us explaining the schedules to parents and to teachers so that they can understand what we're doing. Really cool stuff. We're going to get to that here in just a moment. All right. Welcome to the transformative principle podcast. This is Damon Hargraves guest interviewer for the transformative principle podcast. Episode number 100. I have Mr. Jethro Jones himself, Mr. Transformative principle here today. Mr. Jones is the normal host for the show and it's my privilege to interview him today because this is the 100 episodes. So we want to spend a little bit of time reflecting on everything that's happened since this podcast has started and really specifically what we've been doing here in the middle school over the last year. Again, I'm Damon Hargraves and I'm actually Mr. Jones's assistant principal here at Kodiak middle school. And we really have been doing some things over this past year to transform our school in a better way and do things better. And we have some great processes that we like to share and get some insight from Mr. Jones. So you doing all right, Mr. Jones? Doing great. Does it feel like the tables have turned? It does. I didn't think that I'd be bothered or uncomfortable about this, but I actually am a little bit bothered and uncomfortable. Always a good spot to have a guest. That's right. And I'm so used to asking the questions. I'm not used to having the questions asked of me. So, all right, well, we're going to keep you on your feet today and you're going to have to really activate those brain cells. So we'd like to talk about, I'd like to ask you about the RTI process that we've been working on here in the school and eventually get to a very specific solution that we came up with and get some insight from you about how, what was it about this whole process? Like what, what is your perspective as the principal? So, you know, I haven't asked you these questions before. We've talked a lot obviously, but I'm really interested to hear what you have to say about it. So RTI is something that our school district has been working on for a number of years, but we really gained a lot of headway last year. You want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah. First, before we get there, cause you jumped right in, I want to talk about how powerful this podcast has been for me personally, because so much of what I have done here at our school is what I have learned from interviewing all these other principals and educational leaders. So, you know, a lot of what I'm going to talk about today are things that we have learned by going through interviewing all these principals together over time. And it's been incredibly powerful for me. And I believe that if people go through and listen to the amazing guests that I've had on in the past, they'll be able to take something from every single one of them and implement it in their school and make some really positive change. And that's kind of the culmination was this last year at Kodiak Middle School of how all of this stuff just kind of built up. I took all this amazing information from other people and I'm able to implement it now and seeing some really positive results. So we took a big step up last year with RTI. And I believe that a big part of that was having an opportunity to do RTI in the way that we both really believe that it should be done, that it needs to be very adaptive to student needs, that we need to focus on what the kids really need, not as a lip service thing like, "Oh, the kids need whatever." And that's what we do because it's about the kids, but really looking at the kids and making some hard decisions about what we're actually going to do. So was there a turning point or a time where you felt like you as the primary leadership person in the school decided this is just the way we've got to go and we've got to ramp it up? Was there a point where that hit you? You know, there wasn't like a turning point. It was always my goal when I came here and how fast we moved was basically a function of how many people were willing to get on board that same train. So we've got marvelous support from the school district in implementing RTI processes here. We've got district-wide RTI committee that I was a member of, and then there were enough people in the school that we knew were into the idea of effective RTI. And so maybe there was a turning point. Maybe that was the RTI conference in Anchorage that we went to last year because that's when things really felt like we kind of started going full speed ahead. Whereas the first half of the year, we were talking about things and trying to put things in place. And then we went to the RTI conference in January and then it was like the floodgates opened. And it seems like just yesterday we were there listening to Austin Buffum and filling out that big, huge pyramid with a couple of teachers from our school and making these grand plans. And then now here they are actually working and working really well. So what's interesting about that is that, I mean, when I said pivotal point, that was the pivotal point that I look back and see where the school made a change. I think that you're right, though. I think that maybe we all had ideas that this process was where we wanted to be and or at least was important. Or maybe for some it was just this was something that we were supposed to be doing. But it just didn't quite kick into gear until we all were sitting around that table at that conference and started really putting things down on paper, really mapping out what where school was at that moment and started to see really how far we were already and highlighting what areas we needed to get some supports put into place. So what was it about that conference? So, I mean, we were obviously we had some core team members there. We had some phenomenal speakers that we went and saw. But is there anything? So what I think it was really was it was time for us to think and talk and plan away from the busy day to day of what's happening in the school. And I really felt like we gave ourselves permission to do to come up with whatever we wanted, whatever we could think was important for our school. So it really seemed like there was no any preconceived notions or any, you know, traditions that that we've always done. Like, we always do things this way because we always do things this way. Those things were all pushed aside. And it was really focusing on what is it that we need to do to meet the needs of our kids? And how far are we willing to go to do that? So I haven't really thought about that as the pivotal moment. But now that I think about everything that's happened since then, I can definitely I agree that is the pivotal moment where it changed. And what that gave us was a framework to look at what RTI would be in our school and to be able to make plans for that. And we attended that session with Austin Buffum, where he gave us a big, huge upside down pyramid and said, here's everything you're doing for tier one. Here's everything for tier two. And here's everything for tier three. And he actually made us fill everything out. And we realized we had no, almost no tier two support for our students. We had what was happening in the general ed classroom. And then we had special ed and a couple of foundations teacher who was teaching a foundations class that was basically remedial math and English. And it just wasn't there wasn't anything in between that was helping students who were in between. So they were either doing fine or we were just waiting for them to fail. And we knew that that wasn't good enough. And so we started thinking about ways that we could change that and make adjustments to it. So a lot of times administrators and maybe a couple of teachers go off to a conference and they get really excited about something and they come back and then a lot of times nothing actually happens or maybe they try to do something, but it doesn't stick. Everybody forgets about it by the next year. This was different. So what did you do to keep that flame going? Keep it alive, feed it. How did you keep the momentum? So there are a couple of things that we did that really helped keep it on the forefront of people's minds. The first thing was, was that we established a KMS committee, which is essentially a building leadership team for the school. And we did that right around the time that we went to the conference. That became kind of our our think tank for the school, where we would go there and discuss what we were planning. We would get feedback and buy in and ideas and support from the teachers that were there. And their feedback allowed us to take different steps. And when we came back from that conference and we presented that upside down triangle to them, they saw the glaring hole in the tier two and knew that we needed to do something else for those kids to prevent them from getting to the point where they either needed special ed or needed foundations classes. And that was one very important step is getting a group of teachers together to see what it was that we were talking about. So that when we came back, we didn't just say conference was cool. Here's a new initiative. We came back and continued the planning process with a group of teachers who could contribute to the conversation. And that's that's what I remember the poster that we filled out. What did you do with it? I hung it up. Yeah, it was hung up on your wall in your office. Yeah, you I remember frequently referencing it in conversations with teachers in meeting with the with the rest of the leadership team, the KMS committee. It really did feel like a continuation of that initial team at the RTI conference where we were all sitting around that table. So what were some of the big rocks that you had to move first? Where did you start? The first thing was really giving teachers permission to come up with different plans and to approach the problems in different ways. And that was really vital to being able to move anything was because we had some things in place. And those things were good, but they weren't great. And so one of the things that that was in place was for a while at our school, we had two 45 minute periods dedicated to English language arts. And that's good for kids, right? Because kids need to learn how to read. Kids need to know what they are, know how to write. Those are important things. But not every kid needed two periods to be successful. Now, we had great scores for ELA on our state tests and on the SRIs and the aims of tests. We had great scores for those. But we knew that some kids didn't need that much time in ELA to be successful. We also knew that some kids needed more time in math to be successful. So math teachers were feeling kind of hurt that their content area didn't get two 45 minute periods when they felt like they had a much better justification for that. And our ELA teachers knew that they had two periods and were able to fill those because you can with English language arts. It's not difficult to fill 90 minutes each day. But they also knew that they were the only ones who had that much time with their students. So what we needed to start doing was giving teachers permission to think about that differently. One of the key things that we did there was we reduced English language arts to just one period, as it is in most places. And then we talked to the social studies teachers about teaching literacy through their content. And that has been one of the most amazing things that I've seen in my whole time as an educator, because our social studies teachers have taken that and owned the responsibility of teaching literacy through that. And so they have become language arts teachers who happen to teach it using social studies, which in my opinion is the right way to do it. And they have shown that it is a great way to do it because of the things that they've been sharing. Just today, I had a teacher come in and share a story about a student who has special needs, who's getting IEP services in the area of language arts, and so he's pulled out of a regular language arts class, but not pulled out of a social studies class. And he's able to do the work and meet the expectations of the social studies teacher without any accommodations to help him. And he was able to complete the assignment, be caught up when a lot of other students haven't done it. And this kid has never written an essay before, but he did in his social studies class and did a great job. And that's because of all the hard work that that teacher has done leading up to this point and owning the responsibility of teaching him literacy skills in her social studies class. So not only does he understand the content so much better now, but he's also able to produce things that he's never been able to produce. And that's because of that hard work that his teacher has been doing to make it meaningful to him and make that content area shine through that literacy instruction. One of the great things, too, that I'm seeing in my observations of our social studies teachers, let me step back. When we had a speaker at the beginning of the year, Yolanda, who came in and explained it really, really well, our teaching of literacy is actually teaching students how to think. And so our social studies teachers now are teaching our students how to think about history. And when they're reviewing those history texts and they can teach them all of these, you know, note taking skills and other literacy skills in the context or using social studies as the mechanism for it. And it really gives them some additional tools to use to really help their kids understand the content better. So just like you're saying, I'm seeing that, too. It's really, really cool to see. I'd like to take a step back and we kind of talked about it a little bit, but I wanted to just ask you. So the middle school was humming along. We were doing just fine. Great school. Great school. Great kids. Great teachers. Some of the highest scores in the state. We've just been congratulated for some of our achievements. Why? Why mess with the system? Yeah. You know, that's a really good question. I have a very strong personal belief that we can always be better in everything that we are doing. And this drives virtually everything that I do in my personal life and in my professional life. I just know that we always can improve and grow no matter how good we are. And coming here, I saw a lot of great things, but I also saw a lot of opportunity for some streamlining, some organization to make us even better than we were. It's easy to say the new guy comes in and he sees only the bad things. And one thing that our superintendent has talked about a lot with me, at least, is knowing that there's a story written before your chapter starts. So my chapter one in Kodiak is not Kodiak Middle School's chapter one. And there's a long history here. And you need to accept that history and recognize that that is good before you move on and write your own story. And, you know, I don't know how good I did at that to, you know, people who were watching me, but I recognize that we had a lot of things in place and we couldn't have done everything we did in the last year if those things weren't already in place, because those things being in place allowed us to take the next step. So it was a lot of work that had gone into preparing the way and the things the district has done to set up the school, the things the previous administration has done to set up the school. All those things made it so that when I got here, it was primed for me to just take off. And I come with a skill set, as we all do. And my particular skill set made it easy for me to see the areas where we could get better. Things like adjusting the schedule and making it so that we were able to offer more electives, more intervention classes, and not have to hire any new teachers. That's something that was amazing, right? And we definitely made that happen. And we couldn't have done that without the work that had been done prior to it. But more importantly, for us to be successful with this year where we had budget cuts in the summer and didn't know if we were going to, didn't know if school year was going to start at some point in the summer because of the budget issues in Alaska, we were able to make these radical changes and do that all without having to hire any new people, which is a pretty amazing thing to be a part of. Because we always need more people, we always need more money, and we were able to do what we did without either one of those. Absolutely. One other thing, so I'm just going to add some, this is a really interesting interview, because, you know, obviously I know you and Alistair for the whole process. So I get to like, throw some other things out there that, Yeah, it's awesome. I love it. So something that I saw you do was you kind of shine a light on some areas that maybe nobody was wanting to look or willing to look or had looked before. You know, we, one example of that, going back to the triangle was, yeah, there were some missing areas. It would have been awfully easy to say, yeah, but we're doing okay. But you hung that up in your office and said, look, here's a big giant gap. Yeah, we're doing, we're doing really good, but don't we want to be better? You know, what can we do to meet these kids that are in this certain area? So that's something that I saw. As we were moving forward in the process to kind of implement RTI, what did you do as a leader to facilitate that movement? So our teachers, I guess, you know, sometimes in a school or in a district or really any organization, you can have lots of stops and starts and you can go down roads that are just a complete and utter waste of time. We had pretty solid forward momentum and pretty solid success and movement in the right direction. What do you attribute that to? So I think most of that comes from being able to have a vision and communicate that vision to different people at the right time. So it's easy to have starts and stops when you're not sure what the big picture looks like. It's easy to have starts and stops when not everybody's on the same page. And I was able to ascertain quickly who the respected teachers in the school were and get them in the room together talking about these issues. So we started talking as a group with that KMS committee. Then I went and started talking to the teachers who were going to play an important role. So, for example, the switching from two periods of ELA to one period and having the social studies teachers teach literacy, that was an important point because those ELA teachers needed to be on board and the social studies teachers needed to be on board. So I talked to them very early on about what that would allow them to do and how that would look for them. And so I was able to communicate that vision to them and make sure that they understood what it was going to look like next year. You know, I started those conversations in like February, right after that RTI conference. And then by the time we announced it to the whole staff in end of April, beginning of May, then they had a couple months to think about it, process it and deal with it so that they were ready to make that change. And that was a big help. The other thing was taking little steps and not saying, I explained the vision, but then I explained just the little part that we needed to do next. And we didn't need the ELA and social studies teachers to revamp their whole curriculum today. We needed them to start thinking about how they would do it differently when school started again. So we started with a small step there. Then as people understood more, I would give them more so that they could understand the bigger vision. So the English and social studies teachers within talked about, okay, ELA will be in charge of the literary standards and social studies will be in charge of the informational tech standards. And then you'll both work together on writing, but the ELA teachers will have the bulk of that. So then we delineated that a little bit more. So then we provided some professional development, gave them some time to look at that and see how that would work. And now they're to the point where the social studies teachers are just about the ones leading the charge on the literacy in the school, which is a great thing to have happen. And the ELA teachers are right there with them. Now, there are other content areas that matter here as well. And like math, for example, one of the things that we needed to do with them was talk about what criteria are we going to set for students who are struggling in math? And how do we know when a kid is struggling enough that we need to provide extra support? And those conversations happened about starting in March. And we were able to start talking about that and figure out ways to provide supports for the math teachers so that they knew what kinds of things they needed to be doing to prepare for this year when they would have more opportunities for intervention for their students. So you start, you give the big vision, but you don't tell everything. You tell just the part that matters to that teacher right then. And then you move forward as time goes on, give them more information as they accept the information you're giving them. So something else that I saw that you did was you always made sure that the path that we were headed down was going to be even possible. So before you started talking to teachers about doing that with the schedule, you had a conversation with the curriculum department. Not that you were going to do it regardless. You were just looking at all these options. And that was just one of many options that we presented to the KMS committee. And it was definitely the teachers who took us down this path. But you did a really good job at making sure that, you know, the rocks were out of the way and the trees were pushed back so that we could actually pursue things if we thought it was a good idea. There's nothing worse than sitting in a meeting and thinking that everything's great and coming up with these awesome ideas and then nothing can be implemented. Yeah. So and I'm glad that you brought that up because it's something that I had honestly forgotten about. But I spent a lot of time with our curriculum director talking about, can we do this? Can we do this? Can we do this? And bouncing these ideas off of her and making sure that she knew where we were going so that when she was involved in other conversations, she could have an idea of what our vision was. And she had an idea of all the possibilities we were doing. And once we had that support from her, then everything else, you know, easily fell into place because there weren't these exterior hurdles blocking us. So we we took care of those right then and there before they had a chance to block us. It sure helped that her office is right across the hall from our office, which it is. Yeah, which it totally we were just lucky and we took advantage of it. We sure did. So talking about communication, talk about that a little bit more. Who else did you have to communicate outside of our building to make sure that this could happen and happen? Yeah. Obviously, we had to communicate with the superintendent and assistant superintendent, the district leadership, we had to make sure they knew what was going on. We had to communicate with people who do the scheduling and the system stuff at the district office. And then we need to make sure that the other principals in the district knew enough about what was going on to to buy into the vision as well. Their support was important. And so we talked with them to make sure they knew what was going on and gave enough information that they had an idea of the exciting things that were happening without getting mired in all the weeds and talking about how we were changing. So we had a little bit of feedback, right? Positive and negative. Yeah. Talk about that. What what were some really good encouraging words that we got? So I think that most of what we got was very encouraging. The superintendent knew my history, my experience with RTI and knew that me coming up was making it possible for us to implement some of these things that we've been trying to do and just haven't quite gotten off the ground yet as a district. Making great strides, doing wonderful things, but I was really able to help us take it to the next level. So he was encouraging about what he saw. The curriculum director was encouraging. Partway through this, as we were trying to figure out how to explain this to the teachers and the parents and make sure they understood what our change schedule was going to look like, we made a couple of videos to explain to parents and a couple of our video to explain to parents and video to explain to teachers. And we put those on YouTube, shared them with the board and, you know, didn't get a lot of feedback. And then you had the brilliant idea to start tweeting it out and sharing it. And we shared it with the principals here and shared it with other people on social media. And eventually we had Mike Mattos contact you and say, this looks really cool. I'd love to chat with you about it. Now, not everybody knows who Mike Mattos is, which is a shame because he's a pioneer in this field and has been doing this a lot longer than either one of us has. And he gave you his phone number and said, call me up. And we talked. And do you want to talk about that? Because this is sure. Yeah, no, that was a, that was a highlight for sure. We had come up with a plan to roll these videos out. And we, we didn't want to go completely public with these ideas until we were able to present to the board. And we, we presented to the board, you had the great idea of actually incorporating some of our leadership team to present to the board and talk about why this was the schedule change changes were important. And then they could watch that video as many times as needed till it till it made sense. When we were ready to really promote it to our student body and parents, we wanted it to kind of go viral. And so when we published it to Facebook and Twitter, we did everything we could. We had talked to our PTA ahead of time so that they would retweet it and like it on Facebook and get their friends to do the same thing. And, you know, for us, it went kind of viral here within our own population, right for the people who it was relevant to. And so it met that purpose for for us and even got the attention of Mike Maddox. And he tweeted me and we had a short conversation. He was like, you needed to just call me. Yeah. I was like, okay, Mike, I will call you on your personal line. And and we had about a 45 minute conversation sitting right over here at my desk on speaker phone. And you and I were both sitting there with our notepads taking taking notes. And he was giving us very good feedback about some things, some hurdles that we could anticipate, some questions about what how we were implementing it. He he was very smart in that he never actually said you're doing this wrong. Right. Because he's a smart enough guy to know that every school's going to be different and student populations are different needs are different. But, you know, he had some questions for us and and we had to really think about why we were doing what we were doing. Yeah. And what's so cool about the RTI process and the PLC process, which we're probably not going to talk much about today. But what's so cool about that is that it's not like this rigid, strict thing. It's about really being able to adjust what you're doing to meet the needs of your students for real. And that is incredibly powerful and really motivating to me because somebody like Mike Mattos can tell us, you know, you're doing great. This is what you should be doing. You're going down the right path. But this is your school. You know it better. And here are some of the problems I see. Here are some of the questions I would ask. And I mean, I was honored to have someone like him who literally wrote the book on this thing to sit right over that. Yeah, right there. It's about time by Madison Buffum published by solution tree. I'll put a link in the show notes. And I was honored to have him come and like give his time to us and share his perspective because it's valuable and he's done this and it means a lot to me that he would take time out to do that. So that was a really cool, really cool thing. And I suppose we should probably say what it is, what our schedule is. Yeah. And you know, I'm going to put the YouTube videos in the show notes so that we can, you can watch them and see, see what they look like and please take the time to do that because they do do a really good job of explaining what we're looking at. And essentially what we're doing this year is we are, we created a time for students to get tier two support and time for students to get tier three support when they needed it. So instead of waiting for them to fail, we would be able to anticipate when they would need help. We created a tutorial system, which is what Buffum and Maddos talk about in their book where students go to tutorials. We're doing it on a two week cycle where every two weeks teachers choose to put students in tutorials for areas where they need extra support and help. And students choose to go to their own tutorials if they have the information that they need, if they're demonstrating the proficiency that they should be demonstrating at that time. And, you know, that's a simple idea, but it took all of this work that we've already talked about and a ton more that we're not even getting close to scratching the surface on to actually make that happen in a way that was meaningful for our students. So we also got a call from somebody else. We don't have to name who it is, but not all the, not all the criticism was positive. Not everything was a bunch of compliments. So, you know, we had people that had some, some concerns about it. I remember one faculty meeting where someone said, well, the social studies teachers aren't gonna like this. Yeah. And how'd that go? You know, that actually went pretty well because the social studies teachers said, no, we're good. We've been talking about this for a while. So that was part of the rollout process of giving a little bit to each individual group or teacher to make sure that they had their role clear and then giving it to everybody when we already knew who would be impacted the most was on board and ready to go. So another concern was, so you're telling us that we're losing ELA time also, by the way, it wasn't the ELA teachers that were saying this other people though, that saw the changes would say that how, how did you respond? The push into social studies was our way of saying we're not losing ELA time. We're just putting it in a place where it makes a lot more sense. And it's not really about measuring minutes so much as what is the kid really need? Right. So here are all these systems that we have in place. If the kid needs it, they're going to get this time and more. So, and really, I think what we found was when people really understood the benefits of the schedule, it started to get awfully close to unanimous support if they really understood. And maybe that was the strength of the video is that people could watch it on their own time and watch it again and again and again. But largely people were very supportive and people who did have questions. I remember just loving being able to talk to people if they came in kind of upset or worried or wanting to, you know, get into it. It was a great conversation. And, and what was so good about it was that the schedule that we created actually provides a place for every single student in our school to get the support they need. So parents of students that are gifted and talented, they would say, "Well, what about my student who's always doing great in all of his classes? What does this allow for him?" Well, now he's going to have time to go deeper into a content area, to learn more during this tutorial that is of his choice. "Well, what about my student with special needs?" Well, historically, your student with special needs has never gotten an elective because they've had resource support for math and language arts. So guess what? Now there's an elective opportunity for that student who's never had that before. "Okay, well, what about my student who is just like middle of the road?" Well, that student now gets an extra elective and they have an opportunity to get help when they need it. Or if they don't need it, then they have an opportunity to go to an enrichment activity that takes them deeper into an area. Also, by the way, help is for everybody. Right. Right? So some of our kids who are in advanced classes, you can be in an advanced class and still need a little bit of extra support. Right. And this makes it okay. Yep. And we had kids actually asking for it. When we presented it this way, I remember at the beginning of the year, we had students that said, "You know what? I really want to make sure I do a good job and I know that it's going to be difficult. This is an advanced math class. It's going to be at a much higher level and I want to make sure I have some extra time on my schedule, so hey, can you go ahead and stick me in this math tutorial or win time?" Well, and the win time, which was a brilliant idea, allows students to have that time for whatever is needed. So win stands for whatever I need. Whatever I need, yep. And so they are able... That's a brand new class that we offered this year. Did very little talking about it. All we did was put on the elective choice thing was win. Whatever I need, extra help and study skills. And we put that out and we had a full course of students sign up for it. Way more than we thought. We thought we'd have a cap of like 10 kids. Turned out that we had 25 kids sign up for this course where they said, "I want to use my extra time at school to make sure that I'm keeping up with my work." Now, kids were choosing that. We were not recommending that. We were not forcing that. That just happened. And that was a beautiful thing to see students able to choose that extra time to just have help. And so far, that's been pretty cool to see kids in that situation. And I think it's worth noting too that we hadn't had... We really hadn't had anything like that before. And so there wasn't a preconceived notion that this type of class would just be kind of a blow off class. Right. And that, "Oh, we would just get to go goof off in the library." And that's not what it's become either, by the way. The kids, I believe, like you just said, really did want to utilize that time. Pretty awesome. So talking about this tutorial time, it's kind of a unique time in our schedule. It really is. And that brings with it some major challenges. Yeah. So what were some of those unique challenges? So the way that a tutorial works is every two weeks, we want kids to be able to choose what they want to do. And so that requires some flexibility in scheduling. That requires some dynamic schedules that will change at different times. That requires some teachers to buy into that idea and start doing some things that they're passionate about and that are interesting to the kids. And then one of our big concerns was that if we do this tutorial thing, we're going to have basically an hour every day where we don't really know where kids are. And that was a thing that was stressful to me and you to think that we wouldn't have a way to track where students are supposed to be and they would be out wherever. And Mike Mattos and Austin Buffum, who have been doing this for a while, they have a paper planner system where kids choose based on what they need, and then they get a stamp to go to a certain place. But still, they don't really know where those kids are. And it's a short amount of time. It doesn't need attendance taken, but we need to know where kids are. And that was one of the big hurdles that we saw was how are we going to make that part of it work? And for a good amount of time, we didn't have an answer for that. And that was kind of the last piece that needed to fall into place for this to be successful. And if we didn't have something, then it would be a total disaster in many ways, not the least of which is that we have one secretary in the office during that time. The other one's doing lunch. And she, when parents bring stuff or drop things off or need to pick up kids, that's a very busy time for kids coming and going. And we wouldn't have had a way to find those kids and we would have been interrupting with all calls all throughout that time to get the kids to come down to the office. All right. How did you solve it? I'm going to describe the process because I think that it's really valuable. We looked first, we used PowerSchool and we looked at just using PowerSchool and setting up a tutorial class that would change every two weeks. So it would just be tied into our system. And that wasn't going to happen. So PowerSchool is a great solution for scheduling for a year's worth of classes. Absolutely. We found out not a great solution if you need responsive, flexible on-demand scheduling on a short, with a short cycle. And we really tried everything. I mean, we looked at making the whole year on a two-week cycle. We looked at importing and exporting data into an Excel spreadsheet and doing some automatic things. We had other districts helping us actually in some of that. We did come to a conclusion though that PowerSchool probably wasn't going to actually work for the scheduling part. So then what did we do? So then we looked at some tools that we knew existed. I had worked with sketch.org, s-e-h-e-d.org for planning conferences before. And that was a really good tool, but it's very cumbersome. Like it's really good for planning a once a year conference because you've got time. It's not nimble enough to change every two weeks. And it would have just been way too much time trying to make it work to adjust that every two weeks. One of the things that we needed was students to be able to go in and register themselves, which was another drawback of PowerSchool is that students couldn't actually enroll themselves in a course. They could only request a course and then the counselor had to actually enroll them. And that just wasn't going to work. Sketch allowed them to enroll themselves in the course, but then they couldn't. It was just too cumbersome to do it every two weeks. Lots of clicking, lots of like really complex spreadsheets that you can upload, but they are like they're maddening. I've done it and it's hard to do. So and then you talked about using Moodle and we talked about that briefly because we knew kids could auto. We had it already in the district. We could make it work. But then again, so much work to make it actually happen that it wasn't going to be worthwhile. We didn't really need an LMS. We just needed something that pointed kids where to go. Yeah. And gave them some options. So the next step was we realized that we were going to have to build something to suit our needs. And we looked at, we took two different approaches. You created something in FileMaker like over the weekend because we also use FileMaker. Let me just add to that again, like you were talking about earlier. Well, I guess we were talking about earlier. We wanted to make sure that we had a way to make this possible. Right? So we knew that we could use a booklet and stamp system because we know that other districts, other schools are using this. So we were able to kind of move forward confidently. Yeah. Do you remember when I like wrote, okay, here's what we want. Here's our next step if that doesn't work. Here's our next step if that doesn't work. And if that doesn't work, we're going to use the planner. We had like a growing list of different levels of things that would be our ideal. And backup upon backup upon backup, going all the way down to here's your stamp and your planner. And so, you know, we were able to actually continue this process with teachers, not really knowing what we were doing on this side, because this was just a logistic problem. Right. I mean, this was pure logistics. Teachers don't need to be worried about this. This was just a process, computer logistics thing that needed to get solved. But yeah. And what's so interesting about that is that we knew that if this part didn't work and it wasn't easy for teachers, then it would add frustration to everything else. Right. Yep. And so it was really important for us to get this part right. And because you and I are both tech savvy and kind of nerdy, we knew that there was a way to do it and we knew that we could make it work. So you looked at FileMaker Pro. We also looked at having FileMaker 2 was a system that was already in the district. Right. So politically, you know, we could that might be a good route. That was just another option for us. And you're right. Literally, I got a lynda.com account and borrowed from a friend and jumped in there and learned FileMaker like over a long weekend and built something that could limp us along if we needed to. Yeah. Which is crazy, actually. Yeah. Now that you think about it, you're like, what were we thinking? Where did we go? So there was that. And then we also had talked to Carnegie Mellon's computer science department about having some students come up over the summer, spend some time here and, and actually developed some software for us, either using FileMaker or something that they had created. And that was what the plan was going into the summer. And then that didn't work out. And so then we still needed to get something done and we were run out of time. Yeah. We had a five weeks. Yeah. Something like that. July 1st. Yeah. So I mean, we were, we knew what we needed. I mean, we had lists of features, even some short videos cause we'd made those for Carnegie Mellon, uh, explaining the tool and why. Yeah. And so we knew what we wanted. We knew it was possible. We just didn't know how to do it. So thankfully we finally found a software development company called Guru technologies and they developed this software called Picker for us. And it is exactly what we need because we designed it and we gave them feedback along the way about how it was supposed to work. And school was out by the time they started any work on it. And you were going on vacation. I was heading off on vacation and we were able to long distance, make this thing work and develop this app that allows us to do exactly what we need to do. And it is perfect for what we need because it's exactly what we needed. So it fits every little piece perfectly. And one of the best features of it is that we talked about teachers needed it to work for them. This completely takes the teachers out of the process so that they're, they're a non player in the thing. They, they tell us what their tutorials are and then they don't have to do anything else. If they need kids in their tutorial, they just tell us who they need in and the kids are in there. And then the kids go and sign in themselves and then they're able to sign up for whatever tutorial they want. And the teachers just have to get out a laptop and let them access it. And it's, and if it was a teacher choice, then that's how they get notified that, Oh, I'm supposed to go to this tutorial over here. And so they have access to all that information. And so you're right. The teachers spend very little time troubleshooting and doing anything with it. It's a, there's a survey that goes out every two weeks on a Wednesday that says, Hey, what do you want your next tutorial to be and who do you want in it? Yeah. And super simple for the teachers. We've had some troubles with office 365 actually working for that survey. And that's been the most frustrating part is that, and everything else has been very smooth. Like teachers put in who they want. The kids get assigned there, the counselors inputting all those. And, and it's a very easy way to do it. When you type in a student's name, then the app finds that student. So all you have to do is type in the first couple of letters and it brings up the list of everybody who's named John. And then you can just choose the ones that need to be in that specific class. The students start typing in their name to log in and it brings up their name and then they put in their student number and they log in and they can see all the open choices that they have. And if they don't have any choices because they're in teacher assigned tutorial, then they, they just see what they're going to next week. So in that view, they can see the. Tutorial they're supposed to be in right now and the tutorial they're attending the next time. And that's as simple as it is. And that's all that we need. And then we have those lists of where everybody is each week for the tutorial. And we know exactly where all the kids are, solved every single one of our problems and has been a beautiful, easy solution that is just ground. They can use their own devices. Yep. They can do it at their leisure. They can get with their friends at lunchtime and all sign up for a tutorial together. And that's okay. Yes. By design. We want, we want them to do that. It's just been a great implementation. One of the cool things with it was that we, it was like a, we have the technology. We'd, we know that we can, we know that this thing can be built. I remember having a conversation with you last spring. It was like, I don't know, the guys sitting around at NASA where they're talking about how to, how do we get this Mars lander down to the surface of Mars with no atmosphere? We can't use just, we can't just use a normal parachute. How about we like turn it into a big giant bouncy ball? Yeah. We do we have the technology? Yeah, we have the technology to do that. Okay. So this other lander that we're gonna, um, do, you know, send over there, it's much bigger. I don't think the bouncy ball will work. Okay. How about, how about we use like a, a giant crane with, with like jets that could hover and like build itself and it could like build itself a kilometer above Mars. So we have jets that can hover. Obviously we have cranes. We can just put them together. It'll work. You know? So, I mean, that's obviously way more complicated, but it was one of those things where we knew that the pieces were all there. We just had to put the right pieces together to meet our needs here in the middle school. And I think the big, one of the big things there was we were very confident that, and we had a long list developed of things that we could fall back to if plan A didn't work, so that we could move forward with confidence and it should not be, and it wasn't a concern for our teachers. So good job kind of keeping that focused and not let teachers get distracted by it. Yeah. We're into November now. We've been in this schedule for, you know, all of this year. What are some of the big perks of it that you have seen? So I think one of my favorite things so far is kids being assigned to a teacher choice tutorial, which means that they're needing remediation in something, mostly language arts and math, because they're the ones that can best articulate what a kid needs to be successful. And the kids have been responding really well to that. I've heard of one or two situations where kids are like, "Oh, I don't want to be in a teacher choice tutorial." Almost every other time, the kids are like, "Oh, I'm in teacher choice? Yeah, I need help in math, so that makes sense." And for kids to say that, how cool is that? You know, it's awesome. And they get it, and they understand that it's for them, that it's not because the teachers need something or because the teachers want something. It's because the kid's not performing, and the kid knows they're not performing, and here's a chance for them to actually get help. So that is incredible. Another really good perk about this is that our foundations classes have been able to allow more students to come into them because of how we rearranged what our teachers were teaching. We're running two different math interventions right now that are both being very successful. The one is filling in holes from kids that have deficits and earlier skills that they need to be successful in middle school. The other one is focusing on pre-teaching the content that kids are going to be seeing in the next week. And both of those are producing really good results. Last year, when we had just the fill in the holes foundations class, nearly every single student grew a year or more in that class. So that's showing great growth. And this year, now that we've been able to add in the second way of doing it, students who have never been successful in math are successful in math because they're getting pre-taught the things they need to be successful to be successful in that class. And that is really awesome that kids who hated math and did everything they could to get out of it are now in math doing great and feeling positive about being in there. That's a very exciting place to be for students. And one of my educational philosophies for a long time has been however long kids are here at our school, I want this to be the best educational experience they have. So when they move away, they miss it. And when they get here, they say, this is like the best school ever. I really want that to happen for all of our students, no matter how long they're here. And I feel like we're actually getting close to that right now this year. I can see those kinds of things happening for kids. So giving some practical advice to a principal or a team who is looking to implement something similar, what are some not necessarily like negatives or even pitfalls, but what are some ways of doing things that you would share with people? Like once you've already got it established and you're heading into this first year, share some of those things. That's a good question. I was having trouble coming up with any pitfalls or negatives. I think the pitfalls and the negatives, things to be wary of is relying on something that you're not comfortable with. If we are using a like file maker for this thing, I would have been really uncomfortable. I think based on all the research we did and everything we saw, I think I would have been more comfortable going with the paper-based system than one of the other solutions that we were looking at because they were so there was so much room for error and tweaking and things like that that you needed to stay lean and mean. I like that. I like that advice. Yeah. So like, and the other thing is be really simple about it. Like we didn't get into this complex, like let's define what it means to have to go to a teacher's choice tutorial. We're not going to define that as a school. Each teacher gets to define that for themselves. And then we're just going to support them in that. And they're going to realize that they're going to have these kids for two weeks. And if they choose them for something that is that they don't need two weeks to do, then they're going to be there. The teachers are going to be the ones hating it because they've got kids in there that aren't doing what they're supposed to. And so keep it simple. And what we've done is very simple. It's not a complex issue. It's really simple. So do you remember the term that we learned from our software developers? No. The quickest viable solution? Oh, minimum viable product? Minimum viable. MVP. Yep. Minimum viable product. So that really helped us stay focused in the simplest solution because it would be it would have been easy to make some big, huge bureaucratic, complicated, needlessly complicated solution. Also, that minimum viable product gets you moving quickly because you're not going to be able to anticipate everything. Right. Yeah. And so in leadership, I think that we need to be able to know like, yeah, we don't necessarily know what's around that next corner, but we're well prepared. We've got some other options, and we're going to go ahead and move forward with this minimum viable product. And we did tweak it, you know, multiple times already this year. Yep. And we've got notes on how we want to change it. Yeah. And it was viable. Right. It was viable, and it was simple, and it was easy, and it wasn't didn't require training. Like, I mean, how much training did we give the kids on using it? Zero. Yeah. They got a piece of paper. Got a piece of paper that said, go to this website, log in, here's your username and password, and then choose your tutorial. Yeah. And it was like, okay. And we spent a lot of time training teachers. Yeah. And maybe that's what I would say if we had to do it over again. I don't know that the training that we, actually, I was in charge of that. The training that I did, you know, thinking back on it, I think that it was definitely something that I could have done differently, and I would probably advise. We'll do it differently in the future. If the solution really is as simple as it should be, our training should have been more focused on how to support students and what directions to give students and how to help students help themselves, basically. The, we kept it so, so simple. The username is just their name. They start typing in their name. They can start typing their first name or last name. It doesn't matter. And their name just pops up and then they select themselves. And then their password is their student ID, which they use for hot lunches. And that's all we need. So they should already know all the information. And that was done very intentionally. And it got them going quickly. And really, there wasn't any training needed other than maybe just supporting teachers and how to look up the number. [laughs] And that's been the biggest hurdle is kids who don't typically get hot lunch don't know what their number is. And so they don't know what it's supposed to be. They don't know what they're supposed to put in. And so they come down to the office and say, "What's my number?" And the teacher could look it up or they can send them down to the office. Doesn't really matter because we can help them with that down here too. And it's a really, really easy way to do it. And what's actually cool is that in the Picker app, it's easier to find the kid than in PowerSchool. Fewer class. Faster, fewer class. And what you need appears right there, which is a pretty cool thing too because I've seen our secretaries look up students' numbers. And they do it by going to the Picker app when it's during that lunchtime because it's so fast and easy. They just do a little Command-F and it goes right there to the student's name, which is pretty cool. - Yep. Where do you see our growth now? We've got this new schedule implemented. We've got this tutorial time that's great, giving kids more options. We've done some things that we thought were going to be pretty hard and they were, and we navigated them. So are we just building on this, fleecing it out? Where do you see this going? - So what I see is us continuing to build on it and fleece it out, but also getting better at anticipating needs of students. So if a student is starting to show signs of struggling in math, we want to be able to offer help as soon as possible. If they're showing signs of struggling in other areas, we want to offer help as soon as possible. One of the really cool things that this has allowed us to do is to offer tutorials to students who have been struggling with behavior issues, who don't receive special education services for those behavior issues, and are able to be in an environment where they can have those specific needs met in an intensive two-week kind of approach, and be able to get some support in changing those behaviors quickly. And that's been a really powerful thing that we had talked about and said, like, that's a good thing we want to do. But we want to be able to see that kind of growth in any area that a student needs the growth. And right now, the main focus is English language arts, math, and we've had a couple of behavior situations. And what I'd really love to see is that happening in every content area so that if we see a kid struggling in anything, we plug them into a tutorial to get that help right away. The other one is work completion, is kids getting their work done. If they don't have it done, they get a tutorial for that. And that's been pretty cool to see, too. Teachers taking big groups of kids that should have gotten the work done and for whatever reason didn't, and then being able to help them get it done. Great. Well, we're over an hour. Now you gave me directions on not to go too much over an hour. So is there anything big that you haven't shared yet that you think is pertinent? So one thing is the the PIGUR app is an open source project that any school can download and implement for themselves. It's a very easy to use system. And if you decide to download it and use it, I'd be more than happy to help you get it set up and going. And Damon would too. So you can contact us and ask how we implement it. And it's open source. It's on GitHub. I'll have the link in the show notes and you'll be able to use it and see it and try it out for yourself and see if it's something that's going to be in its development. Right. Participate in its development, too. If you see something that could be fixed, you can fork it and do you start doing your own thing or you can contribute to the overall project, which is pretty cool. We funded this through our local building budget. It was not expensive to build this thing for ourselves. We did a lot of the footwork in planning its architecture and just the coding took a matter of days for the right programmer to step in and do it. And so it's not expensive to do. I think it's reasonable for another principal out there who has a small pool of funds that he could use for this or she could use for this. It's not out of reach. Right. Right. Yeah. So you can get it at picker.org, P-I-C-K-R.org. Can't believe we got that domain name. It's awesome. Right. You picked it. There'd just be people fighting over that domain. Yeah, but nobody picked it. So I just want to thank everybody who's listening to this and who has listened to my podcast. It means the world to me that so many people have listened and shared it. And please do share it with your friends and contact me with any questions you have about being a better principal. And I'm happy to help out and I've learned a ton. I want to share that with anybody who cares to take the time to listen. So on behalf of your audience, I want to thank you for doing this podcast. At the beginning, you talked about how so many of the ideas that you used to implement these processes you got from interviews that you did, the people that you talked with. And thankfully, all of us out here who are listening can actually hear that too. We've all talked with people that have maybe changed the way we think. And you're having those conversations and recording them. So on the behalf of your listeners, thank you. Thank you. Keep doing it. Appreciate it. I will. Here's to another hundred, right? All right. Here we go, man. Transformative Principle is a proud member of the Edu Podcast Network. If you want to learn something new, check out Jennifer Gonzalez's Cult of Pedagogy podcast. She's got a great website with beautiful design and produces really great content all the time.