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Colleagues,
MVP: Being present amplifies the power of the small gifts you share with others. Yesterday I described how presence is more important than presents, and today I wanted to bring in a real-life organizational example. Many schools provide “gifts” to express their appreciation of teachers and other school staff. Typical “presents” include:
These are all nice, but the value of the presents is amplified when leaders are present throughout each day. Presence is what communicates care and value, and the presents are just a nice bit of icing. Presence is the cake. Conversely, without presence, the presents ring hollow. Presence first, presents second. Cheers! Frederick
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Colleagues,
MVP: Presence is more important than presents, and there is nothing stopping you from giving all year long Christmas presents versus Christmas presence… We were extremely blessed to have all four of our adult children home for Christmas, as well as my 92-year young mother. All the kids were around for multiple days and it felt like we had festivities every day. Christmas morning takes a long time. Part of it is the presents, but more of it is the presence. We are all very intentional about the gifts we choose and we take time to share the stories and appreciate the thoughts behind the gifts. Of course, it is easy to understand how presence is so much more important than presents at Christmas. But what about the rest of the year? What if we celebrated every day with presence for everyone? Guess what? We can. Cheers! Frederick Colleagues,
MVP: Just because you are asked to implement something doesn’t mean you need to implement the whole thing all at once. Picture this – a new math curriculum gets rolled out by the state. Schools implement the new math curriculum. If anything changed in the scope and sequence of the content, some kids will be missing chunks of the new curriculum. If this happened once every 20 years, that might not be a huge problem, but it seems many states are constantly revising curricula. In turn, this means teachers are constantly having to change what they teach. One way to cope with mandates is to do phased implementation. Just focus on a small piece of the mandate, not the whole thing. Does implementing a small part of a curriculum make sense? Not really. But neither does changing a curriculum in mid-stream. At least with a phased implementation, teachers will have the time and attention to refine their teaching of the most important elements instead of trying to figure out an entirely new scope and sequence. Cheers! Frederick Colleagues, MVP: Want to improve your culture? Strengthen your relationships. Today on The Assistant Principal Podcast I answered the second half dozen questions I had Claude AI ask me about building a strong school culture. There are significant parts of the show that I invest in talking about relationships. We improve culture by aligning systems. We learn which systems are out of alignment by having our people tell us. Our people tell us when we have invested in relationships with them. Want to improve your culture? Strengthen your relationships. Thanks again to IXL for sponsoring today’s episode.  Cheers!
Frederick Colleagues,
MVP: Be strategic in which problems you focus on and which you leave alone. My computer has recently begun having a problem connecting to our home wireless network. I’m reasonably sure it is an issue with our router, and I could probably go online and do some hunting around for things to try to fix it. This is out of my area of expertise so it will be time consuming and sap my energy and mood. For now, I’m tolerating it. At some point, if it continues to be a problem, I will need to invest time sorting it out. In a world with lots of problems, we don’t need to fix every one of them as soon as they arise. Getting my “out of memory” messages from iCloud and Google are more pressing, and I only have so much time and attention. Cheers! Frederick |
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