Making My Best Year Ever

In chatting with my fourth-grade daughter about New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals for the new year, I provided several prompts to help her think about what she wanted to do better, learn more about, remember, and improve on. In prompting her, I realized I needed to take time to reflect on these same prompts before setting goals for myself! When I told her that I wanted to be a better mom, wife, and principal, she was quick to tell me that I didn’t need to improve – I was already a grown up! This led to an awesome conversation where I got to share that as humans we are never done growing and learning and getting better and that I was definitely going to be thinking and reflecting and setting goals for improvement, too.

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Self-Personalize Any Professional Development You Attend: Reflections from my Week at Harvard

Self-Personalize (1)

I had the honor and privilege of being selected and funded by Raise Your Hand Texas to attend The Art of Leadership at Harvard University Graduate School of Education earlier this summer. I learned more than I could possibly put into one blog post, but 3 things stood out to me about the training. These three practices are why I believe I came away with so many ideas I feel like I can really implement right away – and these three big ideas will shape how I approach future staff development that I attend. I hope sharing these three strategies with you will help you to make connections with content and get more out of your upcoming professional development opportunities.

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Google Forms + Student Self-Reflection for Coaching Students to Own their Learning!

Self-Reflection

John Hattie and his team (learn more at visible-learning.org ) have done some amazing research on what instructional strategies have the most impact on student growth. One of the top strategies is called Self-Reported Grades – which has a 1.33 effect size! This is a HUGELY effective strategy! Check out how Hattie describes this strategy in the short video below: Continue reading