Learning with Your Mistakes with Tom Whitford Transformative Principal 029
Download MP3This week’s interview is with Tom Whitford, an amazing principal of 3(!) schools in Wisconsin.
His mentor that taught him a lot about how to be a leader and how to push yourself and others to be better, book reads, and more.
Professional Learning Communities in Tom’s ideal world.
PLCs require a whole philosophy change to be effective.
How to set the stage to be successful in having discussions with teachers. Power of change comes from stories.
Create opportunities for conversation.
How can administrators tell stories? Start with true stories. (Don’t make things up.) Provide opportunities for real conversation.
What can we do to make this work, and what will prevent us from being successful?
It is too easy for things to get said behind closed doors, and we need to address challenges early on, and then address issues as they arise.
Focus the conversations on continuous improvement on faculty meeting time.
“Jumpstart Fridays” - aides and others work with kids so they can do collaboration times.
How Tom gets teachers to feel comfortable sharing their stories with Tom and the other teachers.
“Speed of Trust” By Stephen M.R. Covey
We don’t get better, unless we can talk about the mistakes that we made.
How Tom figured out that his faculty did not like his strategy for getting them to have fun with his emails. (Background blog post - “Learning with your mistakes”)
Sponsor: Sanebox
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Transformative Principal on Stitcher
Refer A Principal
This week’s interview is with Tom Whitford, an amazing principal of 3(!) schools in Wisconsin.
- His mentor that taught him a lot about how to be a leader and how to push yourself and others to be better, book reads, and more.
- Professional Learning Communities in Tom’s ideal world.
- PLCs require a whole philosophy change to be effective.
- How to set the stage to be successful in having discussions with teachers. Power of change comes from stories.
- Create opportunities for conversation.
- How can administrators tell stories? Start with true stories. (Don’t make things up.) Provide opportunities for real conversation.
- What can we do to make this work, and what will prevent us from being successful?
- It is too easy for things to get said behind closed doors, and we need to address challenges early on, and then address issues as they arise.
- Focus the conversations on continuous improvement on faculty meeting time.
- “Jumpstart Fridays” - aides and others work with kids so they can do collaboration times.
- How Tom gets teachers to feel comfortable sharing their stories with Tom and the other teachers.
- “Speed of Trust” By Stephen M.R. Covey
- We don’t get better, unless we can talk about the mistakes that we made.
- How Tom figured out that his faculty did not like his strategy for getting them to have fun with his emails. (Background blog post - “Learning with your mistakes”)
Transformative Principal on Stitcher
Learn more about today's sponsors, Playworks and IXL:
We’re proud to be sponsored by Playworks, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with evidence-based practices that help schools improve the health and well-being of children by increasing opportunities for physical activity and safe, meaningful play.
We’re proud to be sponsored by Playworks, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with evidence-based practices that help schools improve the health and well-being of children by increasing opportunities for physical activity and safe, meaningful play.
If you’re a school or district leader struggling with the challenge of chronic absenteeism, as so many are across the U.S., you may not realize that structured recess is a research-backed approach to keep kids in school. In fact, a UC Berkeley study of Title I schools found that those partnering with Playworks had significantly lower chronic absenteeism rates. Further, Mathematica research demonstrated that Playworks schools spent 27% less time transitioning from recess back to learning, saving teachers valuable instructional time.
These results are possible for your students, too. Learn how Playworks can help you improve student-educator relationships, belonging, and attendance by signing up for a quick no-obligation conversation.
We’re also thrilled to be sponsored by IXL.
IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:
- Simplify and streamline technology
- Save teachers’ time
- Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
- Improve student performance on state assessments
🚀 Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.
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