MRVED Business
Upcoming Meetings
December 11, 2019 - MRVED Board Meeting (6:00 p.m.)
December 12, 2019 - Teachers' Advisory Council Meeting
December 13, 2019 - Principals' Council Meeting
December 18, 2019 - Superintendents' Council Meeting
MELT 2020 Information
The MELT brochure will be sent out tomorrow, December 5th. The registration link will open on Tuesday, December 10th at 7:30 a.m. Your principal will forward you the email with the brochure and registration link. Principals, please keep your eyes out for this email and send it out as soon as possible. The registration link will also be available on our MRVED website under "Latest News" - www.mrved.com.
We typically have 400-500 teachers register on the first day! Please make sure you register early to try and ensure you are able to attend your top session choices. In each session description, it will be indicated if it meets a particular relicensure area.
Professional Development
Impact Education Conference
Share My Lesson
Many teachers use Teachers Pay Teachers to find excellent teaching resources. TPT is a great site and has some awesome things on it! Share My Lesson is a similar site, but offers materials for free. The TPT quality might be a little better, but SML has some great ideas that might spur your own creative thinking.Book Study
Lead Like a Pirate - Chapters 18 & 19
Chapter 18 and 19 are all about having effective conversations and how powerful words can be. These two chapters resonated with me as I have read a number of articles and books on having effective conversations, namely Jim Knight's book title Better Conversations. The gist of the chapter is about how can we help people move forward through our words and conversations.
In Lead Like a Pirate, they talk about the nature & hierarchy of a school really make it difficult from the start to have effective conversations. This is because most of the professional conversations are centered around observations that are typically used for evaluation. Teachers and administrators have the "fix-it" attitude. The administrator wants to "fix" deficiencies in their teaching. One of my favorite lines comes on page 142, "...nobody wants to be fixed" (Burgess & Houf, 142). Nobody wants to be fixed, but people want to get better. There is a stark difference in those two statements. LLAP mentions that if we are going to help people get better, we have to have a good professional conversation or ANCHOR conversation as outlined in LLAP.
There are three goals of an ANCHOR conversation
1. We want our crew to know we value them while engaging in conversation.
2. After the conversation we want our crew believing we added value.
3. We want our conversations to push practice forward.
A - Appreciation
N - Notice the Impact
C - Collaborative Conversations
H - Honor Voice and Choice
O - Offer Support
R - Reflection
For sake of wanting you to read the book and this chapter, I'm not going to dig into great detail of each part, but it is well worth the read.
Chapter 19 talks about the power of words and provides some suggestions on how to avoid some of the major pitfalls of leaders and their words. As a leader, you lose the ability to think out loud. The minute you start providing your input and ideas, it can stifle creativity and participation. The suggestion LLAP gives is to make sure leaders talk last and simply craft questions to lead others through their thinking. Think of a time when you were in a setting where the leader shared their idea first. What happened? Now think of a time where the leader provided their suggestion last. What happened? There are other suggestions in this chapter, but the one other aspect to talk about is to "remove judgement language from your feedback". Judgement language builds walls. This is where resistance comes in. "I wish you would...I didn't like...If only"...are all sentence stems that bring judgement into the conversation. Avoid these at all costs!
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