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I have listened to Simon Sineck speak several times.  I read a few of his books, listened to a couple of his talks but I do not believe I have heard this one.  Although it is not very different then many of his other talks, this one did speak to me a bit differently.  I especially liked what he said about hiring people who believe what you believe.  A lot of what he spoke about can be applied to a schools mission, vision and goals but using his theme to create a positive school culture is what I really find interesting.

I have worked in several different schools throughout my career.  Culture will make or break a building.  It's the difference between waking up dreading going to work and jumping out of bed excited to start your day.  It really is that simple.  How you feel about what you do and who you do it with defines how successful you will be.  As an educator that equates to how successful your students can and will be.  Again Simon speaks about hiring people who believe what you believe.  I don't think you can have a more valuable asset in a school than like minded people pulling for a common goal.  That does not mean that a principal who hires a bunch of "yes" men and women will be successful.  It doesn't mean people are indoctrinated.  It simply means that when the goals are clearly defined for everyone and they are universally believed in, success can be achieved.  People will strive for those goals in different ways that accentuate their strengths but the end is always in mind.

In a school the goals I refer to are laid out as Mission, Vision, and Goals.  This is the basis in which the school sets their bar.  The mission explains what the school does, the vision what they aspire to be, and the goals are what they are going to do to reach that vision.  If done poorly it can look gimmicky and forced.  But if done correctly it can be the foundation on what a successful school is built on.

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Start with why -- how great leaders inspire action | Simon Sinek | TEDxPugetSound

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The iceberg analogy works well here.  Anything above the water is what is available to our stakeholders, while items underwater are concentrated on internally.

When rolling out a new curriculum plan to faculty it is very important to make sure there is buy-in by the faculty to embrace the new direction. Providing the proper amount of professional development hours to follow up the initial rollout. Providing training and professional development hours for faculty to become comfortable with the material and feel fully prepared to move forward will empower teachers to embrace the new initiative and make it successful in the classroom.

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Curriculum Plan Chris Mondella Meghan Caddlick Rozzie Poirier Date 1 Mission To implement and embrace a rigorous and comprehensive curriculum in the district through collaboration with staff and administration. Mission Vision Vision To become an educational institution that meets

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Curriculum: The content that makes up the instructional framework used to clearly outline a map that signifies objectives, benchmarks, and assessment.

Teaching: The transfer of knowledge from teacher to student.  Academically, socially, emotionally, and mentally.

Learning: The pursuit of and accumulation of knowledge in a variety of areas.

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Rosenshine provides us with principles of instruction that really focus a teacher back on the core basics of good instruction.
By going back to the basics, teachers will be more engaged with students to understand where they are in the learning process.

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Check out this action plan for building Culture and Climate...

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Check out this action plan for building Culture and Climate...

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Building culture and climate will not be effective if coming a a directive from a lone administrator. As you can see in the action plan, it is a team effort enlisting building stakeholders and executed over the course of a school year.

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Module 4 Smart Goal Template Chris Mondella

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A good look at what teacher efficacy is...

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A good look at what teacher efficacy is...

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Through the lens of Collective Teacher Efficacy, John Hattie answers for us - How do leaders develop, foster and sustain teacher efficacy? How does teacher efficacy impact academic optimism?

Teacher leaders focusing on the overall picture and feeling confident with their impact on learning will then drive a thriving curriculum program and support a curriculum rollout. That core confidence in ability drives the successful learning of our students. As a leader, building this efficacy comes from giving the time and space for teachers to have the proper support and professional development to grow that core confidence on a daily basis. Also as a leader, giving teachers the platform to be heard and developing a supportive relationship is critical. Teacher efficacy can't happen with one meeting or directive, it needs relationships to be built to be the strong foundation.

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John Hattie - Collective Teacher Efficacy 2018

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A few articles on implementing teacher efficacy

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A few articles on implementing teacher efficacy

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What Is the School Leader’s Role in Building Collective Efficacy? (Opinion)

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Collective efforts harnessed to become focused school improvement efforts can build positive mindsets, relationships, and trust among staff as well as improve student outcomes, writes instructional coach and educational consultant Beate Planche.

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When teams of educators believe they have the ability to make a difference, exciting things can happen in a school.

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How can school culture/climate support and bolster the learning process for students and adults?

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How can school culture/climate support and bolster the learning process for students and adults?

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School climate and wellness are essential aspects of school improvement efforts that can lead to increased student engagement, attendance, achievement, and success. But cultivating and sustaining a positive school climate that creates the necessary conditions for learning and teaching can be challenging.

The Moving the Needle on School Climate and Wellness Toward a Happier and Healthier School Community webinar series is designed to help school leaders plan and implement policies and practices that improve climate, engage students and staff, and support the needs of all members of the school community.

The series features subject matter experts and practitioners from around the country as guest presenters.

This first webinar, School Climate and Wellness Foundations: Strategic Goals for Improved Teaching and Learning, explores how school leaders can set strategic school climate goals and motivate the engagement of the entire school community.
Who Will Benefit

K-12 school district superintendents and administrators

Principals and site administrators

Teacher leaders, behavior specialists, intervention coordinators

School board members and parent leaders

What You Will Learn

How school climate and culture can impact the quality of teaching and learning

The key elements to improve school climate and wellness, including incorporating student, staff, and family voice; using data effectively; and engaging students in schoolwide efforts

How to set strategic (and realistic) goals for action throughout the school year

Presenters

Jenny Betz, School Climate Specialist, Health & Justice Program at WestEd

Rebeca Cerna, Senior Research Associate, Health & Justice Program at WestEd

View Other Webinars in This Series

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School Climate and Wellness Foundations: Strategic Goals for Improved Teaching and Learning

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School climate and wellness are essential aspects of school improvement efforts that can lead to increased student engagement, attendance, achievement, and success. But cultivating and sustaining a positive school climate that creates the necessary conditions for learning and teaching can be challenging.

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Over the past century, a powerful idea has taken root in the educational landscape. The notion of intelligence as something innate and fixed has been supplanted by the idea that intelligence is instead something malleable; that we are not prisoners of immutable characteristics and that, with the right training, we can be the authors of our own cognitive capabilities.

Nineteenth-century scientists including Francis Galton and Alfred Binet devoted their own considerable intelligence to a quest to classify and understand human cognitive ability. If we could codify the anatomy of intelligence, they believed, we could place individuals into their correct niche in society. Binet would go on to develop the first IQ tests, laying the foundations for a method of ranking the intelligence of job applicants, army recruits or schoolchildren that continues today.

In the early 20th century, progressive thinkers revolted against this idea that inherent ability is destiny. Instead, educators such as John Dewey argued that every child's intelligence could be developed, given the right environment. The self, according to Dewey, is not something 'ready made' but rather 'in continuous formation through choice of action'. In the 1960s and '70s, psychologists such as Albert Bandura bridged some of the gap between the innate and the learned models of intelligence with his idea of social cognitive theory, self-efficacy and motivation. One can recognise that there are individual differences in ability, Bandura argued, but still emphasise the potential for growth for each individual, wherever one's starting point.

Growth mindset theory is a relatively new - and wildly popular - iteration of this belief in the malleability of intelligence, but with a twist. In many schools today you will see hallways festooned with motivational posters, and hear speeches on the mindset of great sporting heroes who simply believed their way to the top. These are all attempts to put growth mindset theory into practice through motivation. However a growth mindset is not really about motivation, but rather about the way in which individuals understand their own intelligence.

According to the theory, if students believe that their ability is fixed, they will not want to do anything to reveal that, so a major focus of the growth mindset in schools is shifting students away from seeing failure as an indication of their ability, to seeing failure as a chance to improve that ability. As Jeff Howard noted almost 30 years ago: 'Smart is not something that you just are, smart is something that you can get.'

Despite extraordinary claims for the efficacy of a growth mindset, however, it's increasingly unclear whether attempts to change students' mindsets about their abilities have any positive effect on their learning at all. And the story of the growth mindset is a cautionary tale about what happens when psychological theories are translated into the reality of the classroom, no matter how well-intentioned.

The idea of the growth mindset is based on the work of the psychologist Carol Dweck at Stanford University in California. Dweck's findings suggest that beliefs about ourselves can have a profound effect on academic achievement and beyond. Her seminal work stems from a paper 20 years ago that reported on a research project with schoolchildren that probed the relationship between their understanding of their own abilities and their actual performance.

In the experiment, a group of 10- to 12-year-olds were divided into two groups. All were told that they had achieved a high score on a test but members of the first group were praised for their intelligence in achieving this, while the others were praised for their effort. The second group were subsequently far more likely to put effort into future tasks while the former took on only those tasks that would not risk their initial sense of worth. Praising ability actually made the students perform worse, while praising effort emphasised that change was possible.

Dweck's work suggests that when people believe that failure is not a barometer of innate characteristics but rather view it as a step to success (a growth mindset), they are far more likely to put in the kinds of effort that will eventually lead to that success. By contrast, those who believe that success or failure is due to innate ability (a fixed mindset) can find that this leads to a fear of failure and a lack of effort.

Imagine two children who are faced with taking a test on a tricky maths problem. The first child completes the first few steps but then hits a wall, and instantly feels demotivated. For this child, the small failure is incontrovertible evidence of simply not being good at maths. By contrast, for the second child, this small failure is merely a barrier to eventual success, and confers an opportunity to improve overall maths ability. The second child relishes the challenge, and works to improve - that child is displaying a growth mindset. According to the theory, the key to encouraging this disposition is to praise the effort and not the ability. By telling children that they are smart or intelligent, you are merely confirming the idea of innate ability, fostering a fixed mindset, and actually undermining their development. Dweck's claims are supported by a lot of evidence, indeed she and her associates have spent more than 30 years exploring this phenomenon, including taking the time to respond to criticism in an open and transparent way.

Growth mindset theory has had a profound impact on the ground. It is difficult to think of a school today that is not in thrall to the idea that beliefs about one's ability affect subsequent performance, and that it's crucial to teach students that failure is merely a stepping stone to success. Implementing these ideas has been much harder, however, and attempts to replicate the original findings have not been smooth, to say the least. A recent national survey in the United States showed that 98 per cent of teachers feel that growth mindset approaches should be adopted in schools, but only 50 per cent said that they knew of strategies to effectively change a pupil's mindset.

The truth is we simply haven't been able to translate the research on the benefits of a growth mindset into any sort of effective, consistent practice that makes an appreciable difference in student academic attainment. In many cases, growth mindset theory has been misrepresented and miscast as simply a means of motivating the unmotivated through pithy slogans and posters. A general truth about education is that the more vague and platitudinous the statement, the less practical use it has on the ground. 'Making a difference' rarely makes any difference at all.

A growing number of recent studies are casting doubt on the efficacy of mindset interventions at scale. A large-scale study of 36 schools in the UK, in which either pupils or teachers were given training, found that the impact on pupils directly receiving the intervention did not have statistical significance, and that the pupils whose teachers were trained made no gains at all. Another study featuring a large sample of university applicants in the Czech Republic used a scholastic aptitude test to explore the relationship between mindset and achievement. They found a slightly negative correlation, with researchers claiming that 'the results show that the strength of the association between academic achievement and mindset might be weaker than previously thought'. A 2012 review for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in the UK of attitudes to education and participation found 'no clear evidence of association or sequence between pupils' attitudes in general and educational outcomes, although there were several studies attempting to provide explanations for the link (if it exists)'. In 2018, two meta-analyses in the US found that claims for the growth mindset might have been overstated, and that there was 'little to no effect of mindset interventions on academic achievement for typical students'.

'Kids with the growth mindset aren't getting better grades'

One of the greatest impediments to successfully implementing a growth mindset is the education system itself. A key characteristic of a fixed mindset is a focus on performance and an avoidance of any situation where testing might lead to a confirmation of fixed beliefs about ability. Yet we are currently in a school climate obsessed with performance in the form of constant summative testing, analysing and ranking of students. Schools create a certain cognitive dissonance when they proselytise the benefits of a growth mindset in assemblies but then hand out fixed target grades in lessons based on performance.

Aside from the implementation problem, the original growth mindset research has also received harsh criticism and been difficult to replicate robustly. The statistician Andrew Gelman at Columbia University in New York claims that 'their research designs have enough degrees of freedom that they could take their data to support just about any theory at all'. Timothy Bates, a professor of psychology at the University of Edinburgh who has been trying to replicate Dweck's work in a third study in China, is finding that the results are repeatedly null. He notes in a 2017 interview that: 'People with a growth mindset don't cope any better with failure. If we give them the mindset intervention, it doesn't make them behave better. Kids with the growth mindset aren't getting better grades, either before or after our intervention study.'

An enduring criticism of growth mindset theory is that it underestimates the importance of innate ability, specifically intelligence. If one student is playing with a weaker hand, is it fair to tell the student that she is just not making enough effort? Growth mindset - like its educational-psychology cousin 'grit' - can have the unintended consequence of making students feel responsible for things that are not under their control: that their lack of success is a failure of moral character. This goes well beyond questions of innate ability to the effects of marginalisation, poverty and other socioeconomic disadvantage. For the US psychiatrist Scott Alexander, if a fixed mindset accounts for underachievement, then 'poor kids seem to be putting in a heck of a lot less effort in a surprisingly linear way'. He sees growth mindset as a 'noble lie', and notes that saying to kids that a growth mindset accounts for success is not exactly denying reality so much as 'selectively emphasising certain parts of' it.

Much of this criticism is not lost on Dweck, and she deserves great credit for responding to it and adapting her work accordingly. In a recent blog, she noted that growth mindset theory 'is on a firm foundation, but we're still building the house'. In fact, she argues that her work has been misunderstood and misapplied in a range of ways. She has also expressed concerns that her theories are being misappropriated in schools by being conflated with the self-esteem movement: 'The thing that keeps me up at night is that some educators are turning mindset into the new self-esteem, which is to make kids feel good about any effort they put in, whether they learn or not. But for me the growth mindset is a tool for learning and improvement. It's not just a vehicle for making children feel good.'

For Dweck, it's not just about more effort, but rather purposeful and meaningful effort. And it's not just in the classroom where she feels that the growth mindset is being misunderstood, it seems to be happening in the home too: 'We're finding that many parents endorse a growth mindset, but they still respond to their children's errors, setbacks or failures as though they're damaging and harmful,' she said in an interview in 2015. 'If they show anxiety or overconcern, those kids are going toward a more fixed mindset.'

Dweck might be right that the theory is not always well understood or put into practice. There is always the danger of disappointment in the translation from educational laboratory to classroom, and this is partly due to the Chinese whispers effect, whereby research becomes diluted and distorted as it goes through its journey. But there is another factor at work here. The failure to translate the growth mindset into the classroom might reflect a profound misunderstanding of the elusive nature of teaching and learning itself.

Effective teaching, at its best, defies prescription. The same resources and the same approaches that are successful in one classroom can be completely ineffective in another. In his book Personal Knowledge (1958), Michael Polanyi defined 'tacit knowledge' as anything we know how to do but cannot explicitly explain how we do it, such as the complex set of skills needed to ride a bike or the instinctive ability to stay afloat in water. It is the ephemeral, elusive form of knowledge that resists classification or codification, and that can be gleaned only through immersion in the experience itself. In most cases, it's not even something that can be expressed through language. As Polanyi put it so beautifully in his book The Tacit Dimension (1966), 'we can know more than we can tell'. As a contrarian colleague once said to me about his frustration with the increasing codification of the classroom: 'Perhaps we should be brave enough to allow it to remain a mystery.'

Good teachers are like good actors, not in the sense that they are both artists, but in the sense that the best teachers teach you without you realising that you've been taught. If students get a whiff of being part of an 'intervention', then it is likely that the very awareness of this will have a detrimental effect. The growth mindset advocates David Yeager and Gregory Walton at Stanford claim that these interventions should not be seen as 'magic' and should be delivered in a 'stealthy' way to maximise their effectiveness - miles away from the standard use of motivational stories, posters and explanations of brain plasticity. As they put it in 2011: 'if adolescents perceive a teacher's reinforcement of a psychological idea as conveying that they are seen as in need of help, teacher training or an extended workshop could undo the effects of the intervention, not increase its benefits.' Pedagogy is not medicine, after all, and students do not want to be treated as patients to be cured.

How students learn well can be very counterintuitive. You might think it is safe to assume that, once you motivate students, the learning will follow. Yet research shows that this is often not the case: motivation doesn't always lead to achievement, but achievement often leads to motivation. If you try to 'motivate' students into public speaking, they might feel motivated but can lack the specific knowledge needed to translate that into action. However, through careful instruction and encouragement, students can learn how to craft an argument, shape their ideas and develop them into solid form.

The idea that videos of failed sportsmen can translate into a growth disposition is unrealistic

A lot of what drives students is their innate beliefs and how they perceive themselves. There is a strong correlation between self-perception and achievement, but there is some evidence to suggest that the actual effect of achievement on self-perception is stronger than the other way round. To stand up in a classroom and successfully deliver a good speech is a genuine achievement, and that is likely to be more powerfully motivating than woolly notions of 'motivation' itself.

One reason for this might be the over-generalised picture of the growth mindset: it tends to be talked about as a global or general skill as opposed to a domain-specific one. Many interventions focus on kids having a kind of global attitude to their own intelligence that can then be transferred to any learning situation but this is rarely the case. For example, some students can have a positive mindset in maths but a negative mindset in history due to a highly variable range of factors. The idea that a workshop on the plasticity of the brain and some videos of famous sportsmen who have failed in the past can translate into a domain-general growth disposition is simply unrealistic.

Students are most engaged when they are being supported through specific tasks to stretch their understanding beyond its current base, but 'engagement' doesn't necessarily mean they're learning anything. As the New Zealand education researcher Graham Nuthall showed in The Hidden Life of Learners (2007), 'students can be busiest and most involved with material they already know. In most of the classrooms we have studied, each student already knows about 40-50 per cent of what the teacher is teaching.' Nuthall's work demonstrates that students are far more likely to get stuck into tasks they're comfortable with and already know how to do, as opposed to the more uncomfortable enterprise of grappling with uncertainty and indeterminate tasks. The psychologists Elizabeth Ligon Bjork and Robert Bjork at the University of California, Los Angeles, describe such activities as 'desirable difficulties', which refers to the kinds of things that are difficult in the short term, but that lead to greater gains in the long term. These point to a range of strategies that are more prosaic and less attractive than growth mindset interventions - familiar strategies such as testing, self-quizzing and spacing out learning.

Clearly, something has gone wrong somewhere along the way between the laboratory and the classroom. The US education scholars Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle outline a fundamental problem with the education system. Teachers, they say in their book Inside/Outside (1992), are subject to top-down models of school improvement, and are often passive objects of study in the educational research that underpins those models:

The primary knowledge source for the improvement of practice is research on classroom phenomena that can be observed. This research has a perspective that is 'outside-in'; in other words, it has been conducted almost exclusively by university-based researchers who are outside of the day-to-day practices of schooling.

In a very real sense, teachers have been given answers to questions they didn't ask, and solutions to problems that never existed. It is not surprising that they feel subject to fads and theories about students that do not hold up to scrutiny. For example, the problem of how to plan lesson content to match the individual 'learning style' of students has now been proven to have been a waste of time, and a sad indictment of how much time and energy has been expended on theoretical interventions with little to no evidence to support them.

Recent evidence would suggest that growth mindset interventions are not the elixir of student learning that many of its proponents claim it to be. The growth mindset appears to be a viable construct in the lab, which, when administered in the classroom via targeted interventions, doesn't seem to work at scale. It is hard to dispute that having a self-belief in their own capacity for change is a positive attribute for students. Paradoxically, however, that aspiration is not well served by direct interventions that try to instil it. Yet creating a culture in which students can believe in the possibility of improving their intelligence through their own purposeful effort is something few would disagree with. Perhaps growth mindset works best as a philosophy and not an intervention.

All of this indicates that using time and resources to improve students' academic achievement directly might well be a better agent of psychological change than psychological interventions themselves. In their book Effective Teaching (2011), the UK education scholars Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds note: 'At the end of the day, the research reviewed has shown that the effect of achievement on self-concept is stronger that the effect of self-concept on achievement.'

Many interventions in education have the causal arrow pointed the wrong way round. Motivational posters and talks are often a waste of time, and might well give students a deluded notion of what success actually means. Teaching students concrete skills such as how to write an effective introduction to an essay through close instruction, specific feedback, worked examples and careful scaffolding, and then praising their effort in getting there, is probably a far more effective way of improving confidence than giving an assembly about how unique they are, or indeed how capable they are of changing their own brains. The best way to achieve a growth mindset might just be not to mention the growth mindset at all.

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Schools love the idea of a growth mindset, but does it work? | Aeon Essays

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A generation of schoolchildren is being exhorted to believe in their brain's elasticity. Does it really help them learn?

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In many ways, teaching is an unusual job. It shares with other professions the requirement that individuals make decisions with imperfect knowledge, but, unlike other professions, there is no shared knowledge base - no set of facts that all involved in doing the job would agree on. The late Professor Ted Wragg, of Exeter University, once suggested that if you got a group of headteachers together, the only thing you could get them to agree on would be the need to pick up litter.

Unlike most other professions, teachers spend much of their working lives without much contact with other professionals, marking or planning work on their own, or with their children in the classroom, and although the widespread use of classroom assistants has changed this a little, in most schools, teamwork is not a major part of many teachers' typical working day.

Teaching is also different from most other professions in that there is a continuing debate about whether professional qualifications are needed - something that would be unthinkable in medicine or the law. In five years' time, we will have a shortfall of 7,000 doctors and 66,000 nurses and doctors in the NHS. Solution? Let's just adapt the "Troops to Teachers" scheme. I don't think anyone would seriously suggest that.

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Research: 'Some research is good - but experience is better '

A further difference between teaching and other professions is the role of research, and who creates it. Very few teachers are involved in academic research, and the vast bulk of published research in education is produced by academics in universities who are rarely involved in teaching the students that are the focus of their research. In other professions, much of the published research is done by those who are still practising.

The role of research in education

The traditional explanation of this is that teaching is not really a profession at all. It is, at best a "partial profession"[1] because its practitioners are not as skilled as those in other professions. While such criticisms do have some measure of truth, I think this is at least partly due to the fact that in the professions that appear to be more "professional" this is not because the state of knowledge is any more advanced, but because those professions have focused on the "low-hanging fruit" and choose not to talk very much about the issues where the evidence is less certain.

For example, in medicine, it is widely agreed that while antibiotics can be effective in the treatment of bacterial infections, they are ineffective against viral infections. This is part of the "knowledge base" in medicine. Except we know that medics often prescribe antibiotics for infections that are likely to be viral in origin. This could be for a number of reasons. Doctors may be prescribing antibiotics "just in case" they are wrong about the viral nature of the infection. It may be that busy GPs feel pressured into giving patients treatments that are unlikely to be effective just to be seen to be doing something (which may, after all, be effective because of the placebo effect). Whatever the reason, what actually happens in what Andrew Pickering calls "the mangle of practice"[2] is a lot more complicated that we generally assume.

More importantly, even in areas where there is a reasonably strong research base, like medicine, that evidence does not provide guidance for a lot of what doctors need to do.

For example, there is reasonably strong agreement amongst medical researchers that it is important that patients complete a course of antibiotics rather than stopping as soon as they feel better, because an incomplete course can result in leaving alive the most resistant bacteria, which will then multiply rapidly. Doctors, therefore, need to make sure that patients understand why, even if they feel better, it is important to complete a course of antibiotics. We don't know much about the best way to do this, because this is an extremely difficult topic to research, requiring an understanding of the quality of the relationship between the patient and the doctor, and a whole host of contextual factors.

In my view, teaching appears to be less "professional" than other professions because the problems that teachers need to solve are just much harder. Physics works because protons and electrons don't have good days and bad days; they behave consistently, and predictably. As soon as humans are part of the picture, things get a lot more complicated.

And that is why I do not think that teaching will ever be a research-based profession. Classrooms are just too complicated for research ever to tell teachers what to do. Teachers need to know about research, to be sure, so that they can make smarter decisions about where to invest their time, but teachers, and school leaders need to become critical consumers of research - using research evidence where it is available and relevant, but also recognising that there are many things teachers need to make decisions about where there is no research evidence, and also realising that sometimes the research that is available may not be applicable in a particular context.

What this means, I think, that those who call for "evidence-based education" are missing the point. Evidence is important, of course, but what is more important is that we need to build teacher expertise and professionalism so that teachers can make better judgments about when, and how, to use research. Two things seem to me to be particularly important here.

First, I think, is that rather than treating teachers as technicians, where we have researchers figuring out how best to teach, and then telling what teachers to do in Lawrence Stenhouse's memorable phrase, treating each teacher as a kind of "intellectual navvy"[3] who is told where to dig, but not why - instead we have to recognise that teacher expertise cannot be put into words. The kind of knowledge that expert teachers have is more like the knowledge of how to ride a bicycle than it is the knowledge of how to solve quadratic equations. I can explain to someone how to solve quadratic equations, but I cannot explain to someone how to ride a bicycle. Each person has to figure it out for themselves. There may be guidance I can give, but there is no set of instructions that will be guaranteed to work.

Second, while there are certainly differences in how good teachers are in their first year of teaching - there is such a thing as natural talent for teaching - what matters far more is the improvement that teachers make, and this is why I think we have failed to make the best of the work of Carol Dweck on mindset. She has shown that some students believe that ability at something like mathematics is more or less fixed - you are either good at mathematics or you are not. This "fixed mindset" as she calls it leads students to believe that when you fail, this must mean you have reached your highest level of achievement, and you might as well give up trying to get better. Other students think that ability is more of a malleable quantity - captured nearly by Jeffrey Howard in the phrase, "Smart is not something that you just are, smart is something you can get."[4] For these students, when they fail, it just means they need to try harder. More importantly, challenging work is not a threat to your self image - a chance to get shown up - but rather a chance to get smarter.

My point is we have been applying Carol Dweck's work to students, and I think we should be applying it just as much to teachers. We all fail as teachers, because we have such high hopes for our students. But the teacher who does not think she or he can get better blames this failure on the students. "What can you expect from students from that part of town?" "From that estate?" "With those kinds of parents?" They fail because all teachers fail, but teachers with a fixed mindset blame this failure on the students: "I taught it, they just didn't learn it."

In contrast, the teacher with a growth mindset says, "What else can I try to help this student learn?" and this has powerful implications for the whole teaching force.

First, a belief that you can get better as a teacher is the key to staying positive about the job. Whatever the management gurus say about the positive possibilities of failure, it is not pleasant. People say "you learn from your mistakes" but that's not quite right. It is much easier to learn from mistakes than from success, but without a desire to improve, failure is just failure. But with a growth mindset, failure is a chance to learn, to improve. I meet many teachers who have improved their practice over the years, and they tell me that they often feel sorry for the students they taught when they were younger. I feel the same way. But the alternative - that we do not improve as teachers - is much worse. It means that every student we ever teach gets the same deal.

Second, and much more powerful, a focus on improvement can transform the teaching force, because it detoxifies professional development. In many schools, in Scotland and elsewhere in the world, managers often operate a kind of educational triage. Figure out which teachers can't be helped, and get rid of them. Figure out which teachers are OK, and leave them alone. And for the ones that are left, the ones who are "struggling", help them get better. With this approach, professional development, or indeed support of any kind, is toxic. Being offered help is a way of saying that you aren't very good, and the goal is therefore not to be identified as being in need of help, and pretending that everything is OK.

If, on the other hand, we accept that every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better, professional development becomes welcome - it is just the way we become better.

And that is why I am so proud to be associated with the work of the Tapestry Partnership, and in particular, to be here tonight, presenting these Professional Recognition Certificates from the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS). The Tapestry Partnership has worked with local education authorities all over Scotland to support teachers in their quest to improve their practice. The teachers here tonight have shown that they are committed to improving their practice. They have undertaken enhanced, significant and sustained enquiry to support the development of their professional learning in a particular area of their practice. They are a model for us all.

After all, if we create a culture where every teacher believes they need to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better, there is no limit to what we can achieve.
Dylan Wiliam is emeritus professor of educational assessment at University College London. This is a transcript of the speech he delivered this afternoon at an awards ceremony for teachers who have taken part in the Glasgow in Partnership with Tapestry's Supporting Improvement: Pedagogy and Equity Programme. Some 197 Glasgow teachers are receiving GTCS Professional Recognition awards today, while 90 recently received GTCS Professional Recognition for the Tapestry Making Thinking Visible programme.

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Dylan Wiliam: Teaching not a research-based profession

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In many ways, teaching is an unusual job. It shares with other professions the requirement that individuals make decisions with imperfect knowledge, but, unlike other professions, there is no shared knowledge base - no set of facts that all involved in doing the job would agree on.

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Principle of Psychology for Teaching and Learning

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Principle of Psychology for Teaching and Learning

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The article above is a good representation of my views on school discipline.  Traditionally when a student does not follow the rules of a school or classroom, past practices would have us assign a very punitive punishment to the student in an attempt prevent future misbehaviors.  The punishment/consequence is assigned and then served without any real conversation about the incident.  This method may have been successful with students who are generally well behaved but many students would continue to find themselves in the Assistant Principal's office.  A generally well behaved student who makes a mistake will likely learn a lesson from having a punitive consequence.  The student's fear of being "in trouble" will likely steer them out of "trouble" pretty quickly.  In my opinion, the reason we would see repeat offenders is because no one is taking the time to sit with these students and allowing them to reflect on their behaviors and how it impacted others around them.  Student's who struggle behaviorally often do so for reasons beyond their control.  Either they are unable to understand what they are doing is wrong, or they cannot see how their behavior effects others.  Some may act out to avoid work, and some may act out to gain attention.  It is up to school administrators and teachers to discover what the root cause is for these behaviors.  That can only be done by spending time with the student and forming a relationship.  These students must be given time to reflect on what they've done and to talk through it.

Of course, the process isn't perfect and you aren't always gong to be able to prevent future incidents, but in my experience it is far more effective than churning out detentions like a widget factory.

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Social & Emotional Learning (SEL)

When elementary students act out, one thing they need is time to reflect on the roots of their actions-and how they might respond differently next time.

Astrakan Images / Alamy Stock Photo

My first job as an educator was in-school suspension monitor. The majority of the students assigned in-school suspension were there because of their behavior, and on my first day, the vice principal explained that the best approach was to walk around the room, never smile, and not be cordial with students.

That mean, hard-nosed, punitive approach to school discipline is a practice from the past that really should be reevaluated. While I respect various approaches to student discipline, I found one particular approach back then that was effective-and it was not the vice principal's. It was giving students a structured opportunity to reflect on their behavior.

During my year as suspension monitor, I had many opportunities to interact with students, and I made it my goal to discover the root cause of their behaviors. I found that just spending time with them, informally talking one-on-one about why they did the things they did that resulted in suspension, seemed to make a difference. Students who were frequent visitors to the suspension room became infrequent visitors. And I learned that outside of the suspension room, they were improving in their academic and social performance.

The Importance of Reflection in Changing Students' Behavior

Perhaps connecting with students and talking with them about their actions was helping them change course in a way that coming down on them had not. And this made sense to me, because in my own years as a student, I seemed to be on a downward trajectory, and two middle school teachers changed my path by taking the time to talk with me. My science teacher appealed to the social and emotional aspect while my language arts teacher spoke directly to my intellectual aspirations and desire to be a better person. Neither approach was wrong; both were what I needed as a young teen looking for meaning and purpose in life.

Students need time and help to think about their actions, and sitting in isolation during detention or suspension is ineffective and counterproductive-it sends the message that no one has time to deal with behavior that does not comply with school rules.

Now a director, I apply what I learned back then to how I approach disciplining students. As adults, we often forget that children make mistakes, and that mistakes are an integral part of learning in behavior as much as in academics. In addition, we can at times neglect the power of care and attention in helping children consider their actions and make better choices going forward.

In the place of such care, we work with a one-sided ideal of how we should address their behavior-leaning at times toward harshness, separation, and correction-to redirect them from their wayward ways. But what if we offered opportunities for students to think about what led up to them making poor choices, and how they should address their own behavior?

Teaching Students How to Reflect on Their Actions

Students need support in complying with rules and opportunities to reflect on their actions when they break rules. Reflection is a skill best supported not by telling students to do it but by showing them how to do it. Unlike administering punishment when a child does something wrong, helping students critically reflect on past mistakes enables them to be proactive in changing how they act in the future. Teaching students to reflect is an intentional process that incorporates love, care, and attention.

I discovered this truth as office referrals were increasing in my school. Detention was ineffective, and students became callous to disciplinary practices, including suspension. As a school, we resolved to teach students to become reflective thinkers. We created a "reflection room" for students who displayed a continued pattern of behavior infractions.

The reflection room is not like in-school suspension-it's an intentional process to engage the student in thinking about specific incidents that continue a pattern of undesirable behaviors that lead to the administration deciding to intervene.

Traditionally, detention and in-school suspension allow students to sit and become more upset. The reflection room, though, asks provoking questions to help the student-and teachers-understand the root cause and expected outcome of the student's actions, which they need to know in order to identify better options.

At the conclusion of the student's time in the reflection room, the student and their parents or caregivers meet with teachers and administrators to discuss the root cause of the child's actions, alternative options for the child's behavior in similar circumstances, and next steps in the case of continued behavioral patterns.

Staff were trained to teach students who were given referrals how to reflect on their actions and become strategic thinkers. The process begins with teaching students to understand and not run from their feelings and emotions-their feelings and emotions are not bad, but how they are displayed can be problematic. Undesirable behaviors typically come at a cost, and students can reflect on a cost analysis of their actions and missed opportunities, both academic and social. Teachers are thought provokers who challenge students to think about their actions in totality, not as isolated incidents.

On day one, staff sit with the students to explain the process. Students complete a reflection sheet with a series of 20 questions to answer either verbally or in writing about the incident(s), their feelings about the incident, their intentions and the results they sought, the cost of their actions, their thoughts about the feelings of those affected by their actions, public perceptions of their actions, and how they would approach similar incidents in the future.

The reflection sheet is saved in the student's file for a few purposes-as a reminder to the student and parents of the agreed-upon steps the student indicated they would take if a similar situation arises, and to determine the number of students who have repeated the reflection process, which also helps to determine the reflection room's effectiveness. The data is disaggregated so we can analyze it by gender, grade level, and ethnicity to ensure that school practices are equitable.

The reflection room is effective and produces results not because it's magical but because it addresses the root cause of student behavior.

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The Benefits of Reflection in School Discipline

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Social & Emotional Learning (SEL) When elementary students act out, one thing they need is time to reflect on the roots of their actions-and how they might respond differently next time. Astrakan Images / Alamy Stock Photo My first job as an educator was in-school suspension monitor.

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When the same routine of information is rehearsed during a session, a fast and impressive improvement may be evident . The gain, however, may not last long, when it is largely dependent on the specific context (of time, place, content, method, specific sequence etc.).

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Center for School Change | Working with educators, parents, business people, students, policy-makers and other concerned people throughout the United States.

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"Without a vision, the people perish." (Proverbs)

Sometimes people think defining a school's vision and mission are relatively unimportant, and can be done quickly. Wrong!

Developing the school's vision and mission are two of the most important steps toward creating a successful program. Done well, they give clarity and direction for a school. A muddy vision or mission can help lead to continuing conflicts, and a school that has difficulty identifying priorities.

In this section, we examine:

Developing a vision statement (including samples)

Developing a mission statement (including samples)

Resources

Vision:

If your school is extremely successful over the next three- five years, how will people describe your school? Think about the answer as you begin to develop the vision. Here are some samples:

Our vision is to create a nationally known inner city elementary school that produces major gains in student achievement, and helps make the neighborhood in which it is located a much more pleasant place in which to live and work

Our vision is to create one of the state's most effective schools helping secondary student who have not succeeded in traditional schools, prepare for, and be accepted into, post-secondary education

Our vision is to create an extremely effective k-8 rural school that not only produces very high levels of student achievement, but also helps train the next generation of rural teachers.

Our vision is to create a k-12 school that is highly regarded for its academic excellence, and for its contribution in actively serving and improving the community in which it operates.

A vision is more than broad, flowery statements. The vision helps people understand how you hope others will view you, and describes some of your highest priorities.

Mission:

This is how you would describe your school to others. The Northwest Regional Laboratory suggests that Charter Mission Statements might want to answer three questions:

a. Whom do you seek to serve?
b. What do you seek to accomplish?
c. How will you proceed (what methods will you use).

This means that a mission statement should include:

1. Ages and other characteristics of students you intend serve,

2. Curriculum philosophy and instructional approaches you intend to use

3. An overall goal or two of the school.

4. One or two special features of the school.

Here are some sample missions:

Our mission is to help urban students who have not succeeded in traditional secondary schools prepare for work, active citizenship, and post-secondary, using a combination of classroom work and community internships

Our mission is to help inner city k-6 students develop higher order thinking skills, peacemaking skills and leadership abilities in an environment of shared values of nonviolence, equality and unity, by using a combination of the Core Knowledge Curriculum and Direct Instruction

Our mission is to partner effectively with the YMCA so that we help prepare middle school students to be responsible citizens, good workers and faithful family members

Our school strives to be a racially and culturally diverse community of students, parents and staff, dedicated to creating a peaceful environment in each person is treated with unconditional positive regard and acceptance. Within such an environment, each student, k-12, will be empowered and inspired to reach his or her full academic, emotional, physical and spiritual potential (part of the Community of Peace mission)

The LeCrescent Montessori Academy's mission is to empower preschool through seventh grade children to unfold their potential as whole and unique persons, and through them create a peaceful world community.

Charter founders sometimes have found it challenging to decide who to involve, and how long to take, in developing vision and mission statements. Our general advice is that charter developers:

Do some initial research in the community to identify unmet needs and wants, before drafting vision and mission statements. For example, if a relatively small community already has one or more Montessori elementary schools, it may not make much sense to propose creating another one. On the other hand, if a community has a number of families sending children to Montessori nursery schools, but there is no Montessori elementary school, such a school may well be viable. If a community has a significant number of students who are not graduating, this may well be a major unmet need that a charter could meet. Include interviews with key community leaders to get a sense of what needs they see as unmet.

Based on your research and your own personal priorities, write a draft mission and vision, possibly with one or two other people who share your ideas.

Include at least a handful of other people in reviewing, commenting and refining a draft vision and mission that one or two people develop.

Establish a time line for developing the original proposal, including a time by which the vision and mission are completed. (Allowing a vision/mission discussion to go on too long can mean that other vital activities are not completed.)

It is not enough for a small group of people to create a vision and mission. Students, faculty and families need to understand a school's vision and mission. The school's faculty and board of directors should periodically review both the vision and mission statements. It may be that the school wants to alter one or both. For example, the highly successful Twin Cities Academy in St. Paul began by serving 6-8th grade students. Based on strong encouragement from families and students, TCA is opening a new high school in the fall of 2004. Some schools start off serving elementary students, and later conclude that they also want to enroll secondary students. Schools may also change their central curriculum or philosophy. If this happens, the school community might well want to change at least the mission, if not the vision.

Resources:

Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory's Charter Starters, Leadership Training Workbook 1: Start-up, nwrel.org/charter/Workbook/cs_workbook1.pdf offers some sample mission statements and includes some discussion of how to create vision and mission statements.

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Vision and Mission | Center for School Change

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"Without a vision, the people perish." (Proverbs) Sometimes people think defining a school's vision and mission are relatively unimportant, and can be done quickly. Wrong! Developing the school's vision and mission are two of the most important steps toward creating a successful program. Done well, they give clarity and direction for a school.

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Advocating for Teacher Leadership at the state level.

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Advocating for Teacher Leadership at the state level.

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As educators, navigating the school year during a global pandemic has added stress to an already taxed education system. Using teacher leadership to empower teachers to take control of their environment and advocate for a positive environment through leadership.

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When looking to add effective teacher leadership to your district it is important to remember the seven domains of effective teacher leader attributes set forth by the National Education Association:

Domain I: Fostering a collaborative culture to support educator development and student learning

Domain II: Accessing and using research to improve practice and student learning

Domain III: Promoting professional learning for continuous improvement

Domain IV: Facilitating improvements in instruction and student learning

Domain V: Promoting the use of assessments and data for school and district improvement

Domain VI: Improving outreach and collaboration with families and community

Domain VII:  Advocating for student learning and the profession

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The Teacher Leader Model Standards-like all model standards-are designed to stimulate dialogue among stakeholders of the teaching profession about what constitutes the knowledge, skills, and competencies that teachers need to assume leadership roles in their schools, districts, and the profession.

These standards were developed by the Leadership Exploratory Consortium, a diverse group of organizations (including the National Education Association), institutions of higher education, practitioners, and state education agencies. The Consortium examined research, conducted surveys, debated, and shared experiences to produce a comprehensive set of standards.

The Standards consist of seven domains describing the various attributes of teacher leadership:

Domain I: Fostering a collaborative culture to support educator development and student learning

Domain II: Accessing and using research to improve practice and student learning

Domain III: Promoting professional learning for continuous improvement

Domain IV: Facilitating improvements in instruction and student learning

Domain V: Promoting the use of assessments and data for school and district improvement

Domain VI: Improving outreach and collaboration with families and community

Domain VII: Advocating for student learning and the profession

Additionally, the Standards can be used to inform the development of curriculum and professional learning opportunities to support teacher leaders' professional growth. They can also be used to develop higher education programs. NEA, in partnership with the Center for Teacher Quality and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, used the Teacher Leader Model Standards as a foundational document to develop the Teacher Leadership Competencies.

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The Teacher Leader Model Standards | NEA

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The Teacher Leader Model Standards-like all model standards-are designed to stimulate dialogue among stakeholders of the teaching profession about what constitutes the knowledge, skills, and competencies that teachers need to assume leadership roles in their schools, districts, and the profession.

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A second example of building culture and climate in a school. 

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A second example of building culture and climate in a school. 

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This action plan spends time both significant building faculty buy-in, as well as student buy-in. The two need to work in tandem to really be fully effective.

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When I first began looking at the program of studies for the Building Level Administration program, this course, Teaching and Learning Curriculum, was the one class that made me a bit nervous.  I have never truly been interested in the nuts and bolts of curriculum.  In fact I have never really considered myself an above average teacher.  I have always loved my subject area, and I have always loved working with kids, but I have never classified pedagogy as one of my strengths.  One of the things that this course has helped me to understand is that good leadership does not come from being an expert on everything.  A good leader does not have to be the smartest person in the room at all times and on all topics.  A good leader will listen to the people around them and focus on executing efficient shared decision making.  I also learned that many of the aspects that define curriculum are topics that I do know a bit about.  Things that I do find interesting, and issues that I can and will be able to manage in the future.  I second guessed myself while reading through much of the syllabus but I am now more confident that when the day comes that I am charged with leading a building, I will be up to the task.

One of the topics I found particularly interesting from this course is ‘collective teacher efficacy.’  This idea is the goal of many administrators.  It lives in the realm of culture and climate and is a key part of a well functioning building.  It is the idea that all the people in the building know where they were, where they are, and where they are going as a building.  It is the constant striving to have your entire team looking in the same direction and understanding that we’re all in this together.  People will disagree on individual topics, and that is welcomed, but the building is all striving for the same specific and clear goals.  A well functioning school district will have these goals laid out in their mission and vision.  A poorly functioning school will have a mission and vision that they do not really aspire to.  A good administrative team is able to inspire collective efficacy.  They will make it a priority in staff meetings and professional development opportunities.  They are able to speak clearly and concisely about the school's goals and how they are going to get there.  People buy into that level of confidence and focus.  Like so many aspects of education, this topic is all about building relationships and trust.  An administrator that builds trust with their faculty and staff will find it much easier to gain support in their agenda items.  When a staff member sees strong commitment from their leaders, they will match that commitment and great accomplishments can be achieved.  This is the type of administrator I want to be.

Another topic that I found interesting during this course was teacher leadership.  It is a topic that I never gave much thought to.  The question I am asking myself now is, what is the motivation for a teacher to become a teacher leader?  In most districts they are not paid much more than simply remaining a teacher and they are asked to do much more.  In my experience good teachers become administrators.  That seems to be the way things are done everywhere.  It has been that way in all the schools I have been a part of.  But, the more I think about that, the more I question the logic.  Why would we take someone who excels at their job and move them to another position where the skillsets don't necessarily equate.  It doesn’t really make sense to me.  Why not find a way to utilize a strong teacher's strengths.  As a teacher leader, this exceptional teacher can help coach and mentor younger and weaker teachers.  This sounds more plausible.  The problem is, teacher leader positions are not incentivized.  Why not create new pathways for teacher leaders in which their strengths are put to good use and appreciated monetarily.  Not everyone is cut out to be an administrator, and not every administrator is cut out to be a teacher coach.  I see this as a gaping whole in the structure of education in New York State.  We lose value in really good teachers when they decide to become administrators simply because that is the only way to be promoted.  As an administrator, I will look to find ways to be creative in accessing the strengths of my stronger teachers.  I also hope that legislation is passed that will also allow teachers to find other pathways to promotion other than administration.

All good students know that you will never stop learning.  That is how I see myself.  This course for example reinforced the importance of being confident in my own abilities.  Just because something seems new, or difficult, does not mean that it cannot be accomplished.  I will continue to try to keep an open mind when dealing with topics that seem foreign to me because like so many things, being honest about your abilities and forming good relationships will help you to succeed.  I enjoyed the course and the people I was fortunate enough to work with.  I would have preferred to have taken the course in person but we all made the best of the opportunities we were given.  I look forward to completing the program in the next year or so and to my future as a building administrator.