Part 1
Part 2
This week's interview is with Tom Whitford, an amazing principal of 3(!) schools in Wisconsin.
- His mentor that taught him a lot about how to be a leader and how to push yourself and others to be better, book reads, and more.
- Professional Learning Communities in Tom's ideal world.
- PLCs require a whole philosophy change to be effective.
- How to set the stage to be successful in having discussions with teachers. Power of change comes from stories.
- Create opportunities for conversation.
- How can administrators tell stories? Start with true stories. (Don't make things up.) Provide opportunities for real conversation.
- What can we do to make this work, and what will prevent us from being successful?
- It is too easy for things to get said behind closed doors, and we need to address challenges early on, and then address issues as they arise.
- Focus the conversations on continuous improvement on faculty meeting time.
- "Jumpstart Fridays" - aides and others work with kids so they can do collaboration times.
- How Tom gets teachers to feel comfortable sharing their stories with Tom and the other teachers.
- "Speed of Trust"
- We don't get better, unless we can talk about the mistakes that we made.
- How Tom figured out that his faculty did not like his strategy for getting them to have fun with his emails. (Background blog post - "Learning with your mistakes")
- Working with 3 different schools
- How he manages dealing with all that they have going on.
- Dealing with the new teacher evaluation system using the Danielson model
- What he has been focusing on as a leader in the three schools: PBIS and RTI.
- What RTI looks like on a day-to-day basis in his school(s).
- What ICE looks like at his school(s). What data they use, and how fluid their groups are.
- Why some students might get less support by entering Special Education than if they stay in their intervention groups.
- How to create opportunities for fluid movement and appropriate support between groups to meet the needs of the students.
- WADITW (We've Always Done it this Way)
- What advice would he give to principals? Relationships
- How being out in the hallways is beneficial (even during parent teacher conferences).
- What is in his office to motivate him? Great sayings in his office and his kids.
- Voxer usage helping him communicate with other principals.
- Shoutout to @gcouros and @mmiller
Web Site
Transformative Principal on Stitcher
Refer A Principal
Best Tools for Busy Administrators Survey
Sponsor: Sanebox