Select a few low-prep, high-impact strategies and recycle them. 

Students and teachers benefit from routine. Think of the best class you’ve ever had, where students were most engaged. What was the activity? What were students doing during the lesson? If you need help generating this list, you may find the strategy from this post helpful. 

Make a list of 3-5 activities or protocols. For example, my top 3 discussion protocols are: circle, socratic seminar, and human barometer. Once you determine what kinds of activities you want students to engage in (e.g., discussion, analyzing text, creative application), list out a couple of protocols that you and your students like to engage with. Bonus points if the activity itself is low-prep and you just need to substitute content-specific text/questions. Keep this protocol bank, and recycle activities each week or unit.  

If you find yourself spending hours making mini lessons ask yourself: How could I teach the same content and have the students practice a different skill than listening and note-taking? For example, my transition from lecture prep to student-centered instruction started with this time saving shift: read through a textbook, make a slide deck, and create a guided  worksheet (~4 hours) → find a text(s), generate 1-2 big questions to answer, and choose a text-based protocol from my resource bank (~30 minutes). My planning was easier and my students were developing text analysis skills. 
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Use tech to speed up grading. 

As a humanities teacher, one of the biggest drains on my time was grading papers and providing detailed feedback. If you teach math, your time may be spent grading quizzes or exit slips. I have time savers for both! 

Technology saved me a ton of time grading quizzes and exit slips. Google Forms (or similar apps through your school’s Learning Management System) is what I used for grading multiple choice assessments—quizzes or exit slips. You can input the correct answers into a form and set it to auto-grade. This way, students receive immediate feedback and as a teacher, I can visually pull up pie charts of how students did in real-time, and re-teach before students leave class, as opposed to the next day. This saves you time and improves student retention of accurate information.  

My paper grading also benefited from technology. Google Docs is helpful for adding comments to student work. I’ve used both typed and audio notes when my hands were tired of typing or I could talk faster than I could type. I used Vocaroo for this and pasted the link into a Doc comment. I’ve also found screen recording to be an excellent way to grade—I can verbally share my comments as if we were in a 1:1 conference while I point to the sections of the paper I’m referring to because I’m recording my screen.  

For more time saving tech tools, get my freebie! It includes a list of 5 Chrome extensions I use to save time planning lessons, grading assignments, and communicating with students and parents. 

Grade during class. 

Formative assessments are great for advancing student learning. Summative assessments are often heralded as the best form of assessment, but the formative assessment leading up to the summative is where the growth happens. Formative assessments may be quizzes or exit tickets, but it could also be listening to students discuss or watching how they approach and solve a problem. Being able to provide real-time feedback is going to help students more than waiting to see how they did a week later on a quiz. Design lessons that allow you to move around and see students’ brains in action.   

You can also provide feedback on more formalized assessments in class. Let’s say students just submitted their first draft of a paper. As you read through these first drafts, I challenge you to write just one phrase of feedback. The goal in this is to identify the most important, highest-leverage piece for students to revise. As you identify these for students, it’s likely you will notice a few categories that are repeating. You can use Micro-Grouping to give students focused feedback in small groups as opposed to writing the same comments on each individual paper. Again, this saves you time and is better for student learning since they can ask questions about your comments in real-time. 

Many of these tips require a re-thinking and re-working of how we currently do things. That’s a necessary part of saving time. We can’t create it out of thin air, so we need to give something up. It’s just a matter of evaluating what is worth keeping and what is worth switching up. 
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Principals, APs, deans, superintendents, and other educational leaders, hello! 

If you’re here, I’m guessing you want to distribute the leadership in your school. You know shared leadership is a good idea for you, your teachers, and your students. Maybe you’re just not sure how much of these things are do-able right off the bat or which ones to should start with. You consume the latest education blogs, books, or podcasts, learning about the innovative teacher leadership systems at other schools, and you want to bring them to your school! 

Maybe you’ve tried to give teachers new leadership opportunities, but they aren’t able to take on the extra work that comes with it. They may seem overwhelmed just keeping up with all of their teaching responsibilities. Maybe you haven’t started yet because taking the first step to change things up feels like stepping off a cliff into an abyss, and you not looking to step off a cliff! 

Leaders, can you relate to this? You are not alone. These are some of the most common pain points and questions I get when coaching leaders. Let’s see what we can do... 

​Make time. Unfortunately, we have a finite amount of time in our days. It is simply not possible to make more time. Trust me, if I could make that happen for you, I would. As one of the most prominent experts on leading change, John Kotter, emphasizes the importance of making space for change. We can’t add to people’s plates without taking something off. If it’s a priority, something else can go. Relatedly, when making your next budget, how you spend your money (and the process for how budgeting decisions are made) should reflect your priorities. We know teacher pay is not great, and we know involving involving diverse stakeholders in organizational decision-making leads to higher quality decisions and a greater commitment to them (Kusy & McBain, 2000). So, if you are unable to make time in the regular school day, find a way to pay teachers for their leadership work beyond their contracted time. Reallocating time or money is not easy, but it will make the rest of the work a lot easier. Still not sure about this “make time” idea? I made you a 1-pager to quickly run through some options! Click the button below to get it.  

Build up shared leadership structures. Take stock of the teacher leadership opportunities available in your school right now. Where can teachers step up and lead? What opportunities do they have to experiment, innovate, problem-solve? Do teachers make up a proportional amount of the leadership team? Are they given authority to make important instructional decisions (with students and parents)? Identify potential opportunities for teacher leadership: leading data collection and implementation for a particular initiative, designing and leading Professional Development workshops for the staff, organizing teacher-teacher or school-school visits, redesigning the school schedule… If you’re not sure what opportunities need to be strengthened or added, ask the teachers! What’s working? What would they like to see? Reach out to other schools and see how they do things.  ​
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Focus on the positive. Appreciative inquiry is a great approach to organizational change. In a previous post, I shared a bit about AI and positive deviance. It’s basically seeking out the strengths in the organization, seeing what is working, and spreading the success across the organization. This stuff works! Cooperrider & Whitney (2005) report these findings from doing organizational change work at a major corporation: “What we discovered quite honestly was that momentum for change and long-term sustainability increased the more we abandoned ‘delivery’ ideas of action planning, monitoring progress, and building implementation strategies. What was done instead...was to focus only on giving [appreciative inquiry] away, to everyone, and then stepping back...what was spreading as a grassroots movement to build the new GTE. Initiated as a pilot training to see what would happen if the tools and theories of appreciative inquiry were made available to frontline employees, things started taking off. All of a sudden, without any permission, frontline employees are launching interview studies into positive topics like innovation, inspired leadership, revolutionary customer responsiveness, labor-management partnerships, and ‘fun’” (p. 12).   

​Model a learning orientation. Prestine & Nelson (2003) found effective principals learn with their staff (ASCD). You are a leader who is constantly investing in your own growth! That’s why you’ve read this super dense blog post this far! Make sure your staff sees that. Participate in PD with them! Teachers notice when you leave the room, and they notice when you stay. Let them see your fierce commitment to learning. 

I applaud you for venturing down this shared leadership path. It’s a bold move, and I am rooting for you. I will not leave you hanging. I’ll continue to blog about this topic because it is my passion! There’s so much involved in doing this well, and I will continue to break it down piece by piece. Next week, I’ll be talking about getting teacher buy-in, so if that’s been a struggle for you, stay tuned! 
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You know power with is better than power over, and the power game is not zero sum. In the  words of Mary Church Terrell, and recently popularized by Emilie Aries, let’s “lift as we climb.” Keep up the awesome, leaders.

This approach is described as “[enabling an] organization to amplify uncommon behaviors or strategies discovered by community members...develop some activities or initiatives based on these findings and measure outcomes. The PD approach brings about sustainable behavioral and social change by identifying solutions already existing in the system,” (“Basic Field Guide to the Positive Deviance Approach”). 

Let’s say you’re interested in reducing the number of discipline referrals. Look at the data, and ask: Is there anywhere where this isn’t a problem? A particular room, type of classes, time of day? What’s going on there? If there are no positive deviants in your school, ask to investigate another school. Are there similar schools nearby that are doing better on this issue? Could you visit or chat with teachers from that school to figure out what’s going on? 

Pedro Noguera just shared an example of this at iNACOL’s 2019 conference. He spoke of an elementary school that struggled with behavior management and food fights during lunchtime. They visited another school in the same neighborhood that didn’t have behavior problems. They quickly noticed they served lunch “family style” instead of the typical stand-in-line and fill up your tray style. Positive deviance is powerful. (Here's the link to that talk.) 

This may take a culture shift, and while you may not get the whole school on board, people will notice your small group’s positive energy and outcomes that result from this work. Welcome new converts in! While some may resist a different way of doing things, remember people’s resistance to change, is often coming from a fear of loss (Heifetz et al., 2009). If we can frame the change as valuing what the community (and individuals) have to offer and simply amplifying that, it’s a lot easier to take in. 

Here’s an organizational culture question to ask of your team: “What would our organization look like if it were designed in every way possible to maximize the qualities of the positive core and enable the accelerated realization of our dreams?” (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005) What would it look like to consistently seek out positive deviance and spread that around? 
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It may look like visiting other teachers in action, regularly reviewing & tracking data on the identified problem. It may look like mini success shares, in which teachers share what has been working really well in their classes. It may look like keeping all of these successes in a shared Google Doc somewhere for when others express interest in checking out all of the good stuff you’re doing.    

Whatever path you choose—talking to an administrator about getting onto a committee or starting a pilot project or informally launching an appreciative inquiry to find positive deviants, you’ve got this. Change is certainly hard, but don’t let that stop you from believing things can get better. They can, and you can lead the charge. Seek out fellow teacher nerds and learn together! Your commitment to lifelong learning is what fuels you. Feed that fire! 

If you haven’t already, check out the Time for Teachership Facebook Group. Your fellow lifelong learners are just waiting for you to reach out and start a conversation! 

I am not a well-being expert, so this list is certainly not inclusive or even “best practice”, but there are some things I knew I wanted to do better, and I wanted to make a list that was realistic—not too long and not too big of a jump from what I was already doing. Listening to Rachel Hollis talk about her “5 to Thrive” daily habits gave me a starting point, and from there I developed my own version of daily goals. Here’s what I’ve been working on: 

• Drink more water. My goal right now is 6 glasses of water a day. As a teacher, I never drank water because then you have to go to the bathroom, and there’s never enough time for that, am I right? I chose 6 as opposed to the standard “8” because most of my cups are 12 ounces, and I just don’t think I could do 8 right away. According to experts, the amount of water you should drink varies by person, so determine what your number is.

 

• Move your body more. For me, as a person whose body enables me to run, that’s what I often do. I try to run (or do some other kind of typically free workout) for 20-30 minutes nearly every day. I find myself much more energized and positive-minded after workouts, so even though it’s hard to wake up early, I try to do this first thing in the morning to start my day off right! I’ve found my creative brain works best in the morning, and some of my most creative lesson ideas have come to me during a run or in the shower afterwards. Usually once a week or so, my body tells me I need to sleep in or just go for a walk that day, and I listen! The recommendation is 150 minutes a week of physical activity, so if I’m putting in 25 minutes a day, I can get to 150 minutes/week in 6 days. Physical activity has physiological and mental health benefits (Mayo Clinic), so however or whenever you move your body, do it!  

 

• Reduce screen time. I’m often on a computer all day for work, and I love TV, so I’ve instituted a no-screens after 9PM rule. I turn off the TV and plug my phone into an outlet in the kitchen for the night. It doesn’t come into the bedroom. If the alarm goes off, I’m even more likely to get up immediately to turn it off. Research on kids has found a strong, negative correlation between screen time and well-being (TIME), and it’s not good for adults either (Care Well Urgent Care). 

 

• Read more. One way I’ve reduced screen time is to try to replace on-screen entertainment with reading. I’m a very goal-oriented person, so setting a rigorous goal of 100 books per year has kept me reading more than watching TV this year. I track my progress on the Goodreads app, as part of their annual reading challenge. I set a goal to read each day, before bed and sometimes for just a few minutes in the morning to help my eyes and mind adjust to being awake before I head out for a run. There a host of benefits to reading more including increasing empathy and encouraging others to read ("8 Science-Backed Reasons to Read a (Real) Book"). 

 

• Check email/social media once a day. I check this stuff at 3:00PM each day, and try not to look at any other time. The Boomerang Chrome extension has been a game-changer for me in meeting this goal. It lets you pause your inbox until a particular time/time range each day. So, unless you un-pause it (which you can, but don’t unless absolutely necessary!), you don’t receive the emails until the designated time. I love it. I chose 3:00 PM because I want my mind to be open and creative at the start of each day. Emails clutter that up, and a negative email can ruin the rest of your day! Who wants that? If you’re worried about someone not being able to contact you, set an away message to let them know you’ll be checking your email at a particular time and give them a non-email option to contact you in an emergency. Similar to email, social media can clutter up my mind, so I just don’t want to see it until my work day is close to over, so I batch any social media with looking at email. I just set aside time around 3:00 to 4:00 just for email and social media tasks. It’s worth it because doing this multiple times a day increases stress and reduces productivity.   

 

• Share your gratitude. I tried writing down what I was grateful for each day, but I felt like it was too much for me. I’m already tracking so much! So, instead, I decided to try to speak my gratitude, either at night before I go to sleep just to myself, or to tell a person directly that I’m grateful for something they did. This makes it more manageable for me, and it lets other people know the positive impact they’ve had on your life! As educators, we know what it’s like to not get to hear that stuff! There are physical and mental benefits to acknowledging gratitude (Psychology Today).  

For me, this takes active monitoring. For you, it may not require tracking your progress, but for those of you who like this kind of thing, I’ve made you a free well-being tracker! This tracker includes the 6 well-being practices I mentioned above as well as a blank space to add your own.
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​It takes some big thinking and some brave acting to be your best self each day. So, download the freebie, practice well-being regularly, and share how it’s going! ​
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We’ve been talking about educational equity (see “Getting Started with Equity” and “6 Strategies for Advancing Educational Equity”). Dress codes can contribute to inequitable and even hostile learning environments for kids. 

As a 12-year old, I was sent to the office for my shorts being too short. The measuring tape was taken out and everything. I was in a position of privilege, as my mom was a teacher at the school and was able to advocate for me, so the negative impact was only about 30 minutes of missed class time. At 12, I knew this was a problem, and I’ve since learned even more about the extent of the problem... 

It’s a big problem, and the sexism of dress codes intersects with racism. Here’s an excerpt from an earlier blog post on acting brave: 

Black girls in the US are disproportionately targeted by school dress codes and experience victim blaming from their teachers. Too many high schools ban hair wraps or other head coverings and regulate skirt/short length and clothing tightness. As an interviewee for this Independent article stated, “Any adult sexualising girls’ bodies by policing their clothing is problematic for students and results in negative academic, social and emotional effects on students. Too often girls recounted stories about administrators implying that girls are inviting sexual harassment because of what they are wearing. Not only is this blaming the victim, it also communicates to boys or other harassers that they are not responsible for their own behaviour.”

Many dress codes even ban particular hairstyles, typically target black hair, citing these styles as “distracting” or “unprofessional” (“Schools are Policing Black Kids’ Hair...”). Watching high school wrestler, Andrew Johnson, have his dreadlocks publicly cut off after being threatened with forfeiting his match was heartbreaking and nauseating. These types of rules are racist—they normalize whiteness and marginalize non-whiteness. This perpetuates the idea of white supremacy (“Hair Politics: How discrimination against Black hair in schools impacts Black lives”). These policies may have been written without such an intention, but once we see the racist policies for what they are, it’s on us to do something about it.  

So, what can we do? 

• Analyze your school’s policies. Ask the tough questions: Who is targeted by the dress code? How much class time is being lost? What do our students think about the dress code? Here’s an example of one school that took a critical look at their dress codes. Read about what they did and what their data showed. Listen to this podcast episode, in which the leader of another school talks about how he listened to the students and transformed the school’s dress code. 

 

• Facilitate conversations about dress code with students. Many of you may not be in a position to influence school policy, but you can still bring up the topic in your classroom. It’s an important conversation for students to have, and they likely don’t have formal spaces to discuss it. Here are some suggested discussion questions and suggestions from Facing History and Ourselves.
  • You could even combine this idea with the previous bullet point and have students complete an action research project. See this document I made for students to learn about what PAR is. In fact, check out all of the resources I used to lead students through a semester-long action research project

 

• Consult a model dress code. Oregon NOW created a model student dress code for schools to use. The dress code itself is simple and thoughtful. Also, the resource includes excellent tips for talking to faculty about dress codes, tips for enforcement of the dress code, and related topics for teachers to teach in classes (e.g., consent). 

 

• Contact your legislators. This summer, California’s Governor, Gavin Newsom, signed the CROWN Act into law, which specifically includes legal protection for people wearing hairstyles such as afros, braids, twists, cornrows, and locs in K-12 public schools. New York state followed suit by amending the Human Rights Law and Dignity for All Students Act to prohibit racial discrimination with regards to hairstyles ("When Natural Hair Wins, Discrimination in School Loses"). Talk to a local educational advocacy organization to see if they pushing for similar legislation in your state. 

If you’re thinking, “What if bringing this issue up agitates the students and they start protesting?”  Use it as a learning opportunity! Introduce them to other students who are doing or have successfully done the same thing. Help them make it respectful and effective. Activism is linked to all sorts of positive outcomes for youth, and being able to speak out against injustice is a skill we should develop in our kids.

Might simply bringing up the dress code draw attention to you as a teacher? Sure. Adults in power may struggle with seeing a point of view that differs from “how it’s always been.” I’m not saying you must risk losing your job if your administration is that hostile, but I am pointing out that the current dress code at many schools disproportionately hurts students who identify as female and students of color, and it particularly hurts students at the intersection: girls of color. Shaming students and removing them from the classroom are not good for students’ self-image or their educational success.  

Addressing an inequitable dress code requires acting brave, for sure. So, take a deep breath, think big, and imagine what your school could look like with a more inclusive dress code. Re-read your best self portrait, or create one if you haven’t already! What are the values you hold when you’re at your best? How do those figure into your response on this issue? And finally, take another look at the youth and adult activists who have successfully fought for a better dress code, channel their bravery, and take a brave step of your own.  
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Let’s get down to it. You know that structurally, educational practice reproduces inequity by race, class, ability, language, and gender. Now, what? Here are several strategies, resources, and ideas to get you started. 

• Listen to recommendations from the experts. In this episode of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast, Jennifer Gonzalez interviews Pedro Nogeura. It is excellent. I am a huge Pedro Noguera fan. Side note: he was one of the keynote speakers for the annual iNACOL conference I attended last week, and he was brilliant as usual. (I’ll share a video of that talk as soon as iNACOL posts it to their YouTube channel.) Anyways, in the podcast episode, Noguera shares 10 ways educators can take action in pursuit of equity. Listen or read the highlights on the associated blog post. Another podcast episode I recommend is this one from the Truth for Teachers podcast in which Angela Watson interviews Cornelius Minor about his new book, We Got This. He talks about inequitable systems, but also how “you can disrupt the status quo in your class.” 

 

• Inventory your equitable practices. The Montgomery County Public Schools created a list of equity practices. I turned these into a Google Form so you can make a copy, edit as desired, and distribute it to your colleagues. (I’ll share a link below.) At my former school, we aggregated the data for our grade teams and chose 1-2 practices to focus on improving for a semester. 

 

• Take a critical look at your curriculum. When reviewing existing curriculum or planning new curriculum, ask yourself if your students have both windows and mirrors in the curriculum. In other words, do they have opportunities to learn about people who have had life experiences different from their own and also see stories that are similar to their own in the curriculum. It’s important to note: traditional curriculum has included a LOT of mirrors for white, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied men. I imagine most students have read lots of books and texts that feature characters and historical figures with that identity. So, leaning more heavily, or even exclusively, on windows (for students who do fit this overrepresented identity) or mirrors (for students who do not), is not unfair. In fact, I would argue it tips the scales more closely towards justice and equity. To drive the point home, I’ll share this quote from Adrienne Rich: When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. 

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I’d love to hear about all of the great work you’re doing to advance equity in your educational communities. Share with me in the comments or in our private Facebook group. Finally, involve others in this work. You can start by simply sharing this post with a friend or colleague! 

Again this work is tough, but so incredibly powerful. 
It absolutely requires each of us to think big, act brave, and be our best selves. 
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​Equity. People may approach this term from different lenses: race, gender, class, ability, language. Educational equity encompasses all of these aspects. I think it’s important to be specific in our language when we discuss equity - what kind of equity are we talking about? It doesn’t have to be the same each time, but when we’re examining a particular equity issue, don’t be vague. Call it out!  

Looking at the data alone, it’s evident educational equity includes several intersecting elements of student identity such as: race, ability, language, class, and gender.  National graduation rates indicate we are under-serving and often actively marginalizing Black and Brown students, students with IEPs, students new to the English language, and low-income students (National Center for Educational Statistics). In the US, Black girls are disproportionately targeted for disciplinary action even for adherence to sexist and racist school dress codes ("Black girls in US pushed out of school over racist and sexist school dress codes, report finds"). The vast majority of transgender students (75.1%) feel unsafe at school because of their gender expression, and 63.4% of transgender students avoid bathrooms (Gender Spectrum).  

If you’re thinking, “This is great, but I just don’t have time for this!” First, I hear you—time is scarce! Second, I would argue at least recognizing the educational inequity that exists and starting to consider how your school may be unknowingly reproducing inequity is critical to our work of educating all children and helping them be responsible, equitable leaders in school and throughout their lives. 

So, where do we start? I’m going to share 2 things you can do that are foundational to equity work. I’ll share more later, but these 2 are BIG, so it’s more than enough work to get started! 

1. Recognize educational inequity exists. Whether this is a new idea or you’ve been fighting for educational equity for years, it’s good to be able to identify why this work is necessary. When we push for equity, we will often come up against push back. Sometimes, the people pushing back simply don’t see the problem. Gather your facts in advance and prepare to share that information with others in need. 
2. Do the self-work. I am in no way the authority on educational equity, but I actively seek out new knowledge about inequity in education and in other realms of society. I cannot fully understand the experiences of people of color or folks marginalized because of their social class or status as a trans* person. I can, however, read and listen to the wisdom of people who have had different experiences from my own and are willing to share. (I’ve started collecting some resources on Pinterest.) I can interrogate my own privilege and critically examine the systems of oppression that maintain patriarchal white supremacy in our educational and legal systems, even when—no—especially when it feels uncomfortable. 

Again, this is tough work. So, here’s a few quick tips from my own journey...

• Be open to growth. Equity work requires a different mindset than the one our society has conditioned us to hold regarding conversations about identity. Racial equity typically proves to be a difficult topic, particularly for white folks to talk about. Robin DiAngelo wrote a book all about it! This work of interrogating privilege and critically examining systems we have spent our lives accepting as “normal,” is hard work. There’s no way around the discomfort. You have to go through it. Jay Smooth’s analogy, however, helped me make the mindset shift that helped me bit a little more comfortable in conversations about race. In his TED Talk, he proposes a powerful metaphor to help shift our mindsets from defending our character (i.e., “I’m not racist!”) to an appreciation of feedback for growth. He suggests instead of looking at anti-racism work as a tonsil removal (i.e., one procedure and you’re not racist), think of it like going to the dentist (i.e., ongoing check-ins are considered normal, healthy, and helpful). Being brought up in a culture steeped in oppressive systems, it is no wonder we misstep, but the important piece of these mistakes, isn’t the mistake itself, it’s our willingness to listen to feedback and choose to be better.
• Check your privilege, literally. Looking for a place to jump right into this work that’s high-impact? These privilege checklists were eye-opening for me. Check them out!
  • "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" - Peggy McIntosh
  • “Straight Privilege” - Erin Tatum, Everyday Feminism
  • “11 Cisgender Privileges You Didn’t Know You Had” - PRIDE
  • “Able-Bodied Privilege Checklist” - ASU Project Humanities

 
This work, although difficult, is one of the most powerful investments you can make in your practice as an educator. Recognize the extent and forms of educational inequity, and talk to others about it. Commit to doing the self-work. Later this week, I’ll share some concrete ideas for improving equitable practice in your schools. We can re-make the systems that were designed to reproduce inequity! 

Have educational equity related questions? 
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