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Education Week
When Brad Seamer became principal of the joint middle and high school in a small South Dakota town in 2008, his predecessor warned him about the hazing. It was best to just look the other way, Seamer remembers being told. In Salem, a rural community on the east side of the state, there had been a long-standing tradition that many of the current students' parents had experienced: Around homecoming every year, seniors would take freshmen out into surrounding cornfields for an "initiation ceremony."
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Department of Education
Principals lead schools in preparing students for successful lives. They are expected to be leaders and guide administrators through vision, instructional leadership, data analysis and planning. It seems pretty clear and defined, right? Yet, most often, if you ask veteran principals if they were prepared to become a principal, they will say "I thought I was until I found myself sitting in that chair." That answer doesn't mean they weren't adequately trained and didn't have sufficient teaching experiences or internships.
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Edutopia
Matthew Howell, a contributor for Edutopia, writes: "One of the most powerful and important things educational leaders can do is develop a positive culture that is self-sustaining and focused on student outcomes. While this is often a herculean task, there are ways to approach this work that I've found to be successful. At one point in my career, I served as administrative liaison to a policy and planning committee in my district. For most, studying education policy is about as appealing as eating a stale saltine, but I relished the challenges associated with the work."
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School Leaders Now (commentary)
Q: HELP! My cafeteria is out of control! I have four cafeteria assistants, but they cannot handle the disrespect, noise, and mess my students are leaving. We have 150 students in the cafeteria at a time. They eat by grade level, and it is a very small space. Any suggestions? A: Your cafeteria assistants are pinned down, outnumbered, and clearly losing hope. Depending upon the realities within your district, you may not be able to ask for more staff, but if you can, I would. Each of your monitors is responsible for more students than most classroom teachers, with significantly less training — that's hard even under the best circumstances.
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HR DIVE
Employees are experiencing more stress than ever. In a study of 1,600 American and U.K. workers, an overwhelming 94 percent reported suffering from stress. The growing stress among workers is a problem employers must address if they want to maintain healthful, productive workers and keep them onboard. The employee-driven market, with record-low unemployment, makes the competition for talent more challenging and more important than ever.
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Harvard Business Review
Why is it easier to see the best solution to other people's dilemmas than our own? Whether it's about someone deciding to pursue a new job, or ask for a raise, or someone simply mulling over which ice cream flavor to choose, we seem to see the best solution with a clarity and decisiveness that is often absent when we face our own quandaries.
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Forbes (commentary)
Timothy J. McClimon, a contributor for Forbes, writes: "A few weeks ago when I wrote about The Four Ps of Leadership (Purpose, Plan, People, Power), I heard from a number of people that I should have included passion or better yet, have substituted passion for purpose as the first P. (I also heard that I should have included patience and persistence, but that's another story.) More recently, I attended an American Express Leadership Academy in London where participants-emerging, high potential leaders from charitable organizations in the U.K.-were asked to rank themselves on a passion-to-purpose continuum. Many were unsure where they fit."
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The Lead Change Group
There's that old saying that two things in life are inevitable, and they're death and taxes. I think several other items can be added to that list, and one of them is conflict. Conflict is that nasty stuff that happens when we feel threatened at the intersection of imbalances in power, money or values.
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By: Patrick Gleeson (commentary)
 The phrase "toxic boss syndrome" is widely used to describe a continuing workplace problem: the really bad boss. How does a toxic boss behave, and what can you do about it? The word "toxic" is particularly appropriate to describe bad bosses because, as research shows, their behavior soon infects entire workplaces. A 2015 Gallop study, for example, concluded that about half of all workers who voluntarily leave a job do so "to get away from their manager."
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Leadership Freak
The illusion of fulfillment causes leaders to crash and burn. Power and authority feel like fulfillment but the feeling is intoxication. Those worthy of power and authority feel humility and responsibility when they receive it. Those unworthy, feel arrogance.
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Time Redesigned
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The Lead Change Group
Trusting your colleagues expertise and letting them get on with what they're hired for is a good start. Your task as leader is to facilitate the conditions in which team members are able to actually get on with it. In the ideal situation, everyone knows exactly what the boundaries are of their responsibility. And only when that responsibility is both appropriate and delegated to the team member can stepped decision-making be implemented. This principle goes for all hierarchical levels in the organization, from the CEO to management teams, and all the way down to the work floor.
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Entrepreneur
We enjoy an embarrassment of riches when it comes to leadership and entrepreneurship resources. From blogs to white papers to scholarly articles published online, there's an answer to almost any question you might have about any aspect of owning and operating your business. And yet, there are still some things that you won't ever truly learn until you actually take over. In this article, let's pull back the curtain and look at five of those unspoken rules about becoming the boss.
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By: Catherine Iste (commentary)
 The end of the year is synonymous with so many unique professional challenges: reconciling the grandiose goals from the beginning of the year with the current status; closing out the books; prepping for more goals and challenges in the coming year, audits, taxes, annual reporting and more. Add to that angry customers, cranky co-workers and the weird time warp that seems to ensure days pass at a faster rate between Halloween and New Year’s than any other time of year and trying to manage stress at work seems almost impossible. Unfortunately, the end of the year is no less busy outside the office.
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THE Journal
For the fiscal year 2018, the United States Department of Education is dedicating $279 million to fund STEM educational efforts within the department. The investments come from the Secretary of Education's STEM discretionary grant funds. "It's important that all students have access to a high-quality STEM education," U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said. "These discretionary grant programs and this Administration's increased focus on STEM will help ensure our nation's students are exposed to STEM early in their lifelong education journeys and will have the tools needed for success in the 21st century economy."
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EdSurge
With thousands of education apps available today, it can seem like students' success is in the palm of their hands. But easy to forget is that technology is not in itself a solution. For it to work as intended, it must be paired with other critical elements: professional development for teachers, thoughtful implementation and consistent engagement.
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THE Journal
In 1970 19 separate school shootings occurred within the United States. In 2018, so far, 87 shootings have taken place. During those nearly five decades, of the shootings where the age of the shooter was known, 157 involved 17-year-olds and 147 involved 16-year-olds. Fifty-seven have involved females. A total of 716 people have been killed or died (including the shooters); another 1,459 have been wounded. Those findings and many other aspects of school shootings make up the contents of a new, open resource developed jointly by the Center for Homeland Defense and Security and FEMA.
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[ProdigyGame.com]
While every school wants to accelerate student math proficiency, administrators at five Texas school districts faced unique obstacles. And although each school had a different story, those administrators shared many key questions when considering tools to reinforce their math curricula. What solution could legitimately:
Boost learning outcomes for students of all economic backgrounds from 1st to 8th Grade?
Succeed on a limited budget, with financial constraints restricting most options?
Engage students, with disengagement being the number one complaint from teachers?
Meet the needs of a diverse student population with a wide range of proficiency levels?
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Edutopia (commentary)
Beth Pandolpho and Mark Wise, contributors for Edutopia, writes: "New teachers have so much to juggle: designing engaging lessons, learning new content, managing a classroom, fielding questions from concerned parents, grading the inevitable volume of papers — the list goes on and on. In the back of new teachers' minds is the lingering question: What exactly should I be spending my time on? We'd like to offer some guiding principles to help new teachers remain grounded and focused while also building confidence and professional capacity."
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MiddleWeb (commentary)
Students love visual texts such as art and photographs, but as with written texts, they often don't know where to begin when asked to look at the works critically. Some may even feel intimidated if prompted to respond to a form of visual art. When shown a painting, they may say, "It's good," or "I like it." When asked why, they may vaguely note the subject of the painting or talk about how the painting makes them feel.
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Center for American Progress
Few clear-cut fixes exist in education. When it comes to school enrollment, however, a specific centralized process exists that is both simple for families to navigate and efficient for schools and districts. Traditionally, school districts have assigned families to their neighborhood school by default. Yet over the past two decades, access to a variety of public school options has increased dramatically, especially in large urban areas. According to a 2017 analysis by the Brookings Institution, the proportion of large school districts that offered school choice doubled from 2000 through 2016.
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By: Patrick Gleeson (commentary)
 The two most often-used ways of teaching children to read are phonics and whole language. Each of these methods has committed advocates and both teaching methods are currently used, but according to The National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than half of fourth-grade students in the U.S. read below grade-level standards. What are we doing wrong?
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EdSurge
Over the summer, academics debated the impact of growth mindset, the belief that one's intelligence can be developed with hard work and effort, and whether it can move the needle on academic performance. Even Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, who is often credited with the term, chimed in with additional research supporting the efficacy of mindset interventions.
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The Atlantic
Four years ago, Paul France left a teaching job in the Chicago suburbs to move to San Francisco and be part of the so-called personalized-learning revolution in education. He joined a high-profile start-up called AltSchool whose investors include Mark Zuckerberg and the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. France was passionate about both education and technology and welcomed the opportunity to combine the two. But they would not prove to be as complementary as he thought.
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Edutopia
Imagine a classroom where the students understand that they are unique, where their individuality is not simply accepted but celebrated; where their differences are not hidden, but rather used to expand learning in the class. A quiet, artistic student's interests are not only known, but purposefully included in the curriculum. Another student's active, bold temperament is not extinguished, but rather used to help elaborate her and others' understanding.
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Medical Xpress
New research has found that a large percentage of Australian eight to 12 year olds are being bullied and/or experiencing emotional difficulties — and these children are falling behind their peers in numeracy and reading in the classroom. The Murdoch Children's Research Institute's Centre for Adolescent Health has produced the Student Wellbeing, Engagement and Learning across the Middle Years report for the Federal Department of Education and Training.
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Education DIVE
ven though many policymakers and education leaders widely support early-childhood education programs, questions over the short- and long-term benefits of preschool continue. But research findings are often affected by how a study was designed, who was in the sample, and what period of time is covered by the study.
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Promote visual literacy across the curriculum with easy-to-use activities for 21st century classrooms. Includes customizable forms and a PDF presentation for professional development.
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Reuters
More than half of U.S. children may not be getting the recommended amount of physical activity and doctors can help by making exercise one of the "vital signs" assessed in routine health checks, researchers say. "We need to start asking children and their parents questions about physical activity on a routine basis. Exercise guidelines for families should be specific, and education about what counts as 'moderate to vigorous physical activity' should be included," said the lead author of a study presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics annual conference in Orlando, Florida.
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Education DIVE
While art, music and drama are part of many early-childhood education programs, researchers — and educators — still have a lot of questions about how these experiences benefit children in the early grades and as they continue through school. Such questions have grown even more relevant for school and district leaders since passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which provides multiple opportunities for the arts to be part of a "well-rounded" education.
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EdSource
Californians went to the polls to elect a new governor, superintendent of public instruction and members of the Legislature. Together they will have the responsibility to build upon California's efforts in recent years to strengthen state accountability, support local control and provide enhanced funding for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. We would like to offer a brief education improvement agenda for their consideration.
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NAESP
The American Student Council Association has partnered with the Department of Veteran's Affairs to create a fundraising challenge to support homeless Veterans. Several schools across the country have signed up to participate. The contest runs through Dec. 3. Sign up for ASCA today to get your council involved in national competitions and service projects.
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NAESP
Learn strategies and techniques on dealing with difficult staff, teachers and students from subject matter experts that will assist Early Career Principals with these challenges. Join us on Tuesday, Dec. 4 for our Early Career Principal's Webinar Series "Dealing with Difficult People; Staff, Teachers, Students and Stakeholders."
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