Adventures in Administration

Photo credit: Flickr http://goo.gl/mI8NLQ This past weekend I attended  IntegratEDSF (#isf14).  Halfway through my morning session on day 1, my mind was already swimming with new ideas.  Then came the Key Note and look out, full mind explosion!  iSF is a very different type of conference as you only have two sessions in a day that are designed to be workshops rather than an hour of information coming fast and furious and then on to the next session with no time to process in between.  This was my first time attending iSF and I I will be back.  But that isn't why I am writing this post.  I am writing this post to reflect on some of the lessons I learned over the weekend... Failure to Communicate My morning session was facilitated by Pernille Ripp (@pernilleripp) author  and teacher extraordinaire.  The session was entitled: The Empowered School.  It was a fantastic conversation that caused me to think about when I say "yes" vs...

The school year begins in about 3 weeks for us.  I have spent the summer supposedly preparing myself for this new position: Associate Principal.  I dutifully vacated my old post of Social Sciences Chair and attempted to leave the department and its offices more organized and user friendly than when I arrived--the old adage of: "Leave the World a Better Place Than When You Found it" was my mantra as I sifted through literally decades of old text books and files.  I then began to make my new office my "home". Again I sifted through decades of books and files.  At times I wondered if I was making the right decisions.  After all, I've never done this job before so who am I to decide what stays and what goes? Slowly I gained confidence and books from the 1980s and 1990s on teaching methodologies were sent to the recycler, files were digitized, file cabinets removed.  I'm not finished yet (10 boxes and counting still to review) but I feel much better about my ...