Eddy Turns Blog

 For me, it means focusing on the kids first and always. And SMART goals with "zones" gives us a way to do this. Listen to the podcast on our home page from the webinar "Engaging Students in Change" and you'll hear some of the best examples of goal monitoring and adjustment involving kids and their teachers that we've ever seen.

Anne and I had the extraordinary opportunity of participating as one of 24 women-owned companies (selected out of over 100) to present to investors in NYC. Springboard Enterprises https://www.springboardenterprises.org/about is the organizing group, and through them we've discovered a wonderful community of support. These are women who are passionate about making positive change in the world, whether through advanced traffic management systems, connecting women to "best of" brands, or like us, transforming American public education.

We're in a Kairos moment right now, a moment between what was before and is no more, and the unknown future. 

Kairos (καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment. The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time in between, a moment of an undetermined period of time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos

As I continue to reflect on the visit to the Hudson School District, as described in Part I of this post, the ABC’s of Accountability, Building leadership capacity, and Collaboration come to mind.

The recent “cheating scandal” in the Atlanta Public Schools has policy-makers, administrators and media pundits awhirl with causal theories and stop-gap measures to get control of the situation. Swift action was taken by Atlanta's interim superintendent, Erroll Davis, to produce a "preliminary action plan to -- among other things -- scrutinize all suspicious test scores, review the academic records of some students and implement new ethics training for teachers.”

What is the relationship between professional learning communities (PLCs) and S.M.A.R.T. goals? One way to think about this is from the perspective of a school’s organizational capacity for change, learning and improvement.

In schools that function as professional learning communities there is strong organizational capacity. In these schools you’ll find teachers who:

Prior to the start of the current school year, our district decided to add accelerated classes in 9^th & 10^th grades notwithstanding the potential loss of some cherished electives classes at upper grades. This decision caused an uproar that revealed a philosophical divide within our community. Some parents are concerned their children aren’t being challenged enough while others believe heterogenous classes are critical to keeping diversity alive and well. 

Have you heard of “initiativitis,” the disease that contributes in significant ways to our nation’s continuing achievement gap?

Schools and districts with initiativitis pursue program after program in a desperate and frantic effort to improve performance. What they get instead is overwhelmed teachers and administrators and flat or even declining student results.

Thanks to a Google Alert on "SMART Goals in education" we discovered the positive and inspiring newspaper account of Hudson School District’s journey towards greater student achievement. A congratulatory call to Sandi Kovatch, Director of Learning, was in order. As it turned out, I was the bearer of good news about the coverage in the Hudson paper. I quickly emailed Sandi a copy and our connection with Hudson School District began . . . again.

What if we empowered every student to take ownership and leadership for his or her learning?

What would that look like?