By Evan Robb

America and the world are experiencing a time of significant change, a time of great challenges. Educators, with little to no warning, have had to transition learning and instruction to an online environment for millions of children. In tandem with shifting learning and teaching to the online world, we also face the challenge of moving our schools’ cultures to teaching and learning online. This shift creates an opportunity resulting in a challenge to you and myself: If the culture of our schools and divisions will need to exist online, then we have a collective responsibility to sustain our schools’ cultures and keep them alive and maintain their vitality. This will require leadership.

When things run smoothly in schools, we often take leadership for granted. However, during these times of the changes and challenges caused by the spread of COVID-19, we start to define leaders and their leadership by their words and actions. To maintain the positive elements of a school’s culture in this climate will require collaborative leadership that includes administrators, teachers, and support staff. 

If you are an administrator, consider these six reflections so you can set the tone in your online school. If you are a teacher, apply these same reflections to your online classroom. All staff has a responsibility to create the school they want during this time of remote learning.

As you review my six points and my culture-building questions, consider where you are right now, what you are doing well, and what changes you can make. 

Six Points and Questions for Reflections

Set the Example: Educators must set an example of what behaviors define the school during remote learning. Collectively, we set examples through modeling, consistent response, and repetition. Consider the professional examples set in lesson creation, expectations, personal efficacy, taking risks, being innovative, or the example set in maintaining communication and feedback to students and families—inconsistency results in confusion.  

Culture Builder: Are your actions setting an example and inspiring others to do more and be more?

Enhance Connections:  Take time to make connections with students, families, colleagues, and friends.  Everyone will handle the time of remote learning differently, but most people in education enjoy making connections.  

Culture Builder: Are you initiating connections? How are you making connections? Are you sharing successes and challenges with colleagues? 

Cultivate Relationships: Positive administrative-teacher-student relationships are always part of an effective classroom and school.  Relationships don’t happen by accident; they require effort and a commitment, a mutual understanding that they are important. 

Culture Builder: How are you creating positive relationships remotely to get students motivated and interested in engaging in learning?

Do Maslow Before Bloom: Grace before grades. We cannot fully understand the challenges faced by all families and students. This is a time to be flexible, more caring, and more empathetic. Schools can exist without grades, but they can’t without feedback. 

Culture Builder: Are your lessons and communications demonstrating flexibility, empathy, feedback, and grace over traditional assessment?

Choose Optimism:  Appearing down or frazzled can have a negative impact on those around you. Effective principals and teachers create and model a definable tone for communicating optimism and positivity. Staff who model optimism impact other staff, students, and the culture of a school.  Optimism is the ability to focus on where we are going, leaders own their optimism, and everyone can be a leader.

Culture Builder: It can be hard to be positive during difficult times, but each day we can choose to be optimistic about the future, better days will come. Are you choosing optimism through words and actions?

Engage in Self-Care: Educators give to others. But to be our best, we also need to give to ourselves. When we do, we are better. Better at instruction, collaboration, communication, reflecting, learning, and perpetuating the culture of our classrooms and schools 

Culture Builder: How will you take care of yourself knowing this will make you more effective at what you do?

Reflect on these six points and culture-building questions as you lead remote learning and hone your school’s culture in a remote learning environment. To nurture your school’s culture during remote learning, offer supportive feedback, help with finding appropriate materials, meet frequently to answer questions, and live growth mindset every day, knowing that with time and hard work, school leaders, teachers, staff, and students can move forward in a positive environment. Make a commitment for yourself, students, parents, and schools to enhance your school’s culture every day!

Audere est Facere

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By Todd Nesloney

I’m sure you’ve all heard that phrase in one variation or another. But when you genuinely take the time to pause and reflect on the idea, ask yourself, How often do you truly make every moment count?

Sometimes those moments may exist within your personal lives. Making sure you take time for yourself means: slowing down long enough to plant a flower garden; create a piece of artwork; indulge in a Netflix binge; or even just walk through the local park.  When you set aside moments to slow down and spend time with yourself, you’re making moments count.  You’re acknowledging that personal moments can fuel you with energy, creativity, and a desire to reflect.

So many of us, especially educators, find ourselves spinning our wheels constantly trying be better, working harder, taking on more projects.  And in doing that, we often allow special, quiet moments slip right by us. Unnoticed.

Taking time to nurture yourself is not a bad thing. It doesn’t mean you’re lazy, blase, self-obsessed, or unattached.  Instead, it shows how much you value your personal health and knowing that to be your best you need to be mindful of three elements: your mental, spiritual, and physical health. You will never be able to do what you’re meant to do unless you cultivate and maintain the creative fire within you.

Making every moment count also includes the students and adults you come in contact with every day. You can quickly allow the to-do list, constant stream of interruptions, and your own emotional reaction to events to distract you. Being engulfed by work can push aside those moments that fall right in front of you, waiting to be noticed–moments such as:

• That moment where the teacher across the hall is suffering through a recent cancer diagnosis. She longs for someone on her team to ask, “How are you doing?” so she feels she isn’t walking this road alone.  

• That moment where a child walks in with his head down, hating who he is, because that morning his father beat him again and spewed hateful untruths about the boy he raised.

• The single mother, who works three jobs to give her children the life she never had.  She struggles to get her kids to school on time and every morning keeps from making eye contact with the school staff fearing they’ll label her a “bad mother.”

• The high school senior who just learned of his acceptance into the college of his dreams but has no one to share the good news with.

• Or even something as simple as the little girl who passed her first test of the year and wants someone to tell her, “I’m proud of you.”

Moments like those I described exist, and they’re there for the taking.  The question though is Will you see them? There is scientific research that proves when you show gratitude to others, it increases your positive mood, more than it increases theirs. But will you understand the power of a single moment? Will you make it a priority to find ways to make moments matter for others?

“Make every moment count!”

You and I have heard it before. So today, let’s pay attention to the silent whispers of moments that are calling you to action:  moments when you reserve time to care for your mental, spiritual, and physical well being; moments when you reach out to support others crying for help. Grab and hold those moments close to your heart.  Take a deep breath and find the time to make every moment matter more than it ever has before.

Get connected with Todd Nesloney!

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• Todd’s Website for speaking engagements- his books and more!

Effective leaders create positive cultures through reflection on their practice and the decisions they make.  In education, leaders can be teachers, administrators, and any of the many staff members who make up a school.  All can impact change!

Positive change is complex and often has many moving parts needed for a school to be effective.  A positive environment impacts the culture of a school. You can feel it; you can sense if a school has a good culture. Conversely, you can sense and feel if a negative culture exists in a school. Bottom line, the leader of the building sets the tone for the school and directly impacts the culture.

What does setting the tone mean?  I have known principals who certainly set a positive tone and others who have not set a great tone. What the leader of the school models and says permits others to do the same.  A principal who yells at students gives staff permission to yell. A principal who is never on time for meetings gives others permission to be late. A principal who dresses sloppy permits others to do the same.  Yes, everything done by the leader sets a standard, either through words or actions. As Todd Whitaker says in his book, What Great Principals Do Differently, when the principal sneezes everyone gets a cold.

The principal sets the tone but it cannot be done by one person; all staff has a responsibility to create the school they want.  If you are an administrator consider these reflections as you work to set the tone in your school. If you are a teacher apply these same reflections to your classroom.

As you review the seven points, here is a thought to consider. It is hard for one teacher to ruin the culture in a school, but the principal can absolutely do this independently.  Being a culture builder is one of many critical responsibilities of a principal.

Set the Example:  It is critical for the principal to set the example of what behaviors are acceptable in the school.  This requires consistency and a high degree of congruence between what the leader says and does. Inconsistency results in confusion and staff often not believing what the principal says.  

Say Hello:  Although this sounds small, people like it when the principal says “Hello.”  Walking by staff and ignoring them is rude and communicates an I don’t care about you attitude.  Always and I do mean always say “Hello” to students, staff, and parents. This simple change can make a big difference in how others see the principal, and the tone they set.

Be Interested: Students and staff appreciate the principal who is interested in what they are doing.  If interest is genuine, the principal communicates a sense of caring. If interest appears disingenuous, the effect is the exact opposite.  Use specific praise to compliment teachers and students on classwork or a performance you have seen.

Choose Positivity:  Appearing down or frazzled will have a negative impact on those around you. The principal sets a definable tone for communicating optimism and positivity.

Cultivate Relationships: Positive teacher-student relationships are always part of an effective classroom.  The same is true for a school leader. The principal needs to invest time to build positive connections with many groups: students, staff, parents, and the community.  Something as small as ignoring a parent in the grocery store can impact how others see you.

Be Fair and Consistent: Having favorite staff members is a morale killer.  Be consistent and fair to all staff. Treat every teacher like you treat your best teacher.  

An Open Door:  Desk work cannot be more important than communicating with people.  A message of “I’m too busy” does not help set the tone for a school.

School culture is like a garden it needs to be tended every day.  If the tone is positive, congratulations, you had much to do with creating it.  However, if you or others feel the tone is negative, take a look in the mirror to find the answer.

Website: Robb Communications

Blog: The Robb Review Blog

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Recently, I was interviewing candidates for a language arts position.  Several candidates just finished college and were eager to start a teaching career.  Included was one question all candidates had to respond to: How would you teach a particular short story to a group of students?  A frequent answer I received was, “Read it to the students or let the students read it out loud.” Letting students read out loud in front of the class is commonly referred to as popcorn or round-robin reading.  One candidate proudly explained a reading game called “bump,” where students would read out loud and could intermittently call on another student to continue the reading. Bump permits students to embarrass one another or to catch another student not paying attention.  No student should graduate from any college or university and bring such archaic and at times hurtful methods into a classroom. Popcorn, round robin, and bump reading should never be part of an elementary, middle, or high school classroom!

As a middle school principal, I am often asked what types of reading should occur in a middle school English classroom? What is a balanced literacy program? My answer is not that complex: “Reading can and should be taught.”  In addition to the teacher reading aloud for students’ enjoyment, every middle school classroom should have three types of reading:

• Instructional Interactive Read Aloud
• Instructional Reading
• Independent Reading

Instructional Interactive Read Aloud

An interactive read aloud allows the teacher to model in a think aloud how to apply a reading strategy. This modeling during a read aloud builds and/or enlarges students’ mental model of how a strategy works. For this aspect of instruction, I suggest that the teacher models with a short text that matches the genre and/or theme that ties a reading unit together.  Short texts can include a picture book, an excerpt from a longer text, a folk or fairy tale, myth or legend, a short, short story, or an article from a magazine or newsletter.

Here are six of many skills and strategies that you can model in interactive read-aloud lessons:

• Making inferences
• Linking literary elements to a text
• Identifying big ideas and themes
• Locating important details
• Skimming to find details
• Emotional responses

The interactive read aloud is teachers’ common text. Once teachers complete the modeling over five to eight classes, they have a reference text to support students by reviewing a lesson. Then, they move to reading aloud from texts that resonate with students.

Instructional Reading

Instructional reading occurs during class. Students need to read materials at their instructional reading level, which is about 90 % to 95% reading accuracy and about  90% comprehension. Organizing instructional reading around a genre and theme—for example biography with a theme of obstacles—permits students to read different texts and discuss their reading around the genre and theme. One book for all does not work.  Based on a false assumption, one-book-for-all assumes that no one has already read the book and everyone is on the same reading level.

As an example, the class opens with an interactive read-aloud lesson that lasts about ten minutes.   Next, a transition to instructional reading. Find books for students in your school library, your community public library, in your class library, and the school’s book room (if you have one).  Instructional reading books stay in the classroom, as students from different sections may be using the same materials each day.

Instructional reading asks students to apply specific skills and strategies to texts that can improve students’ comprehension, vocabulary, and skill because these texts stretch students’ thinking with the teacher, the expert, as a supportive guide.

Independent Reading

Students should always have a book they are reading independently. By encouraging them to read accessible books on topics they love and want to know more about, you develop their motivation to read!

Have students keep a Book Log of the titles they’ve read and reread. Do not ask students to do a project for each completed book; that will turn them away from reading.  Reflecting on the value of independent reading is important. Getting hung up on how you will hold students accountable is not valuable. Remember, enthusiastic readers of any age do not summarize every chapter they read in a journal. Neither do you!

Students should complete twenty to thirty minutes of independent reading a night, and that should be their main homework assignment. If you’re on a block schedule, set aside two days a week for students to complete independent reading at school. If you have 90 to 120 minutes for reading and writing daily, then independent reading should occur every day.  This is not wasted time. When students read the teacher can read part of the time which communicates a great message to students: adults read independently, too! Equally important during this time, teachers also confer with a few students about their reading.

Including the three types of reading in a middle school curriculum brings balance, engagement, and motivation to the curriculum and holds the potential of improving reading for all students. We must be better than popcorn reading as a go-to-method for a teacher to use with students.  We must be better than reading out loud for an entire class. We need a balanced framework, a balanced literacy program. Encourage your teachers to give the three types of reading a try. The goal is to increase students’ reading skill and help students become lifelong readers. But the goal is also to reclaim the professionalism language arts teachers and students deserve.  

Website: Robb Communications

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