Dangerously Irrelevant | @mcleod

Books I finished reading (or rereading) in June 2020…

• On Liberty, John Stuart Mill [government]
• How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi [civil rights]
• The Secret Adversary, Agatha Christie [mystery]
• Thinblade, David Wells [fantasy]
• Sovereign Stone, David Wells [fantasy]

Hope you’re reading something fun too!

I am talking with schools to see how they’re responding in the wake of this global pandemic. I invite you to join me for the Coronavirus Chronicles, a series of check-ins with educators all over.

Episode 039 is below. Thank you, Heather Cucuzzella and Olivia Collison, for sharing how the Immaculate Conception School in Towson, Maryland is adapting to our new challenges and opportunities. I especially appreciated hearing about your customer service orientation and how your tightly-knit community all pulled together this past spring! 

See the complete list of episodes, which also are available as a podcast channel on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you and your school(s) would like to be featured in the Coronavirus Chronicles series, please get in touch. 

Other conversation series that may be of interest are below. Check them out!

Conversation series with educators during the pandemic

• My co-author, Dean Shareski, has started a podcast, What’s Happening?, which is focused a little more on instructional issues than leadership.
• Future Ready Schools just launched its new podcast series, Leading Through Unprecedented Times.
• International Schools Services has a webinar series called Educators Supporting Educators: Transitions to Online Learning, which features conversations with and resources from international school educators.

I am talking with schools to see how they’re responding in the wake of this global pandemic. I invite you to join me for the Coronavirus Chronicles, a series of check-ins with educators all over.

Episode 038 is below. Thank you, Mark Hardeman and Blair Peterson, for sharing how the International School of Tanganyika in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania is adapting to our new challenges and opportunities. I especially appreciated hearing about your scheduling logistics, inquiry approaches, and commitment to engaging students and families. And I loved your 20-day graduation celebration for your seniors!

See the complete list of episodes, which also are available as a podcast channel on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you and your school(s) would like to be featured in the Coronavirus Chronicles series, please get in touch. 

Other conversation series that may be of interest are below. Check them out!

Conversation series with educators during the pandemic

• My co-author, Dean Shareski, has started a podcast, What’s Happening?, which is focused a little more on instructional issues than leadership.
• Future Ready Schools just launched its new podcast series, Leading Through Unprecedented Times.
• International Schools Services has a webinar series called Educators Supporting Educators: Transitions to Online Learning, which features conversations with and resources from international school educators.

Jimmy Casas said:

a system which assured [students] of success only to find out [that] meant success for those who were willing to play the game of school and who were compliant. . . . students attended school in body but were absent in mind and in spirit. In other words, they had checked out and were just hanging around the prison yard of lost potential waiting to escape. (Culturize, p. 24)

Every day, all across the nation, we ignore, waste, and destroy enormous amounts of human potential because we take the vast diversity of humanity that is our students and shoehorn it into a ‘one size fits all’ model. Their failures are ours. The fault lies with us, not with them.

What are we doing to activate our students’ latent potential beyond the narrowly-proscribed ways that schools currently choose to recognize? What is our moral urgency for doing so? What are some concrete actions that we can take immediately and in the future to liberate our students from the oppressive structures of teaching and schooling that currently restrain their hopes and possibilities?

See also

• The biggest indictment of our schools is not their failure to raise test scores

Thought I’d post a quick update on how my new summer Master’s seminar, Leadership for Social Justice, is going. I’ve got six students in the class. We meet virtually every Monday for a couple of hours, in addition to our other activities.

The students co-constructed their learning experiences with me. We are trying to approach the class through a very broad social justice lens, which means that we’re discussing a variety of different school leadership equity contexts. We spent our first class getting ourselves organized, which included brainstorming some things that we wanted to do together this summer and identifying the learning outcomes that we wanted to achieve. We committed ourselves to focusing on actionable leadership practices, not just ideas and theory. Our course textbook, Equity Visits: A New Approach to Supporting Equity-Focused School and District Leadership, aligns closely with that commitment.

We focused on anti-racist educational leadership practices in our second class. Two students helped curate our readings and multimedia pre-assignments for the week and provided lots of choices for us. The reading that probably sparked the most discussion was Paul Gorski’s article in Educational Leadership on Avoiding Racial Equity Detours. We spent the second half of class deconstructing a couple of race-based educational cases from Gorski’s book, Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education.

My students are completing one-page reflections each week of what is in their heads at the moment. Additionally, each is identifying an inquiry project on an equity-focused topic of their choice. I will share those in a future class update. We are off to a good start!

Thought I’d post a quick update on how my new summer Master’s seminar, Leadership During a Crisis, is going. I’ve got six students in the class. We meet virtually every Tuesday for a couple of hours, in addition to our other activities.

The students co-constructed their learning experiences with me. We are trying to approach the class with a very broad leadership lens. That means that we’re discussing crisis leadership practices across a variety of societal sectors, not just education. We spent our first class getting ourselves organized, which included brainstorming some things that we wanted to do together this summer and identifying the learning outcomes that we wanted to achieve.

Our first guest was Shawn Loescher, CEO of the Urban Discovery Schools in San Diego, California. He articulated quite passionately what it meant to respond effectively to the needs of students and families during the coronavirus pandemic this spring. We appreciated his values-driven leadership lessons and had an awesome discussion afterward. Our guests for the next two weeks are from the business and fine arts sectors.

My students are completing reflections each week of what is in their heads at the moment. Additionally, two students are going to try their hand at creating a case study on crisis leadership (and hopefully submit for publication). One student is diving deep into an inquiry project and another is creating some professional learning modules for school leaders. Finally, two students are working with me to analyze and write up my Coronavirus Chronicles interview series. They will co-author a book chapter with me and get a publication for their resumes!

I am talking with schools to see how they’re responding in the wake of this global pandemic. I invite you to join me for the Coronavirus Chronicles, a series of check-ins with educators all over.

Episode 037 is below. Thank you, Deron Durflinger, for sharing how the Van Meter Schools in Van Meter, Iowa are adapting to our new challenges and opportunities. I especially appreciated hearing how your previous investments in technology integration, competency-based education, flex mod scheduling, and personalized learning all came together as you moved into full-time remote instruction.

See the complete list of episodes, which also are available as a podcast channel on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you and your school(s) would like to be featured in the Coronavirus Chronicles series, please get in touch. 

Other conversation series that may be of interest are below. Check them out!

Conversation series with educators during the pandemic

• My co-author, Dean Shareski, has started a podcast, What’s Happening?, which is focused a little more on instructional issues than leadership.
• Future Ready Schools just launched its new podcast series, Leading Through Unprecedented Times.
• International Schools Services has a webinar series called Educators Supporting Educators: Transitions to Online Learning, which features conversations with and resources from international school educators.

I am talking with schools to see how they’re responding in the wake of this global pandemic. I invite you to join me for the Coronavirus Chronicles, a series of check-ins with educators all over.

Episode 036 is below. Thank you, Gerald Fussell, for sharing how Lake Trail Middle School in British Columbia, Canada is adapting to our new challenges and opportunities. I especially appreciated hearing how your earlier investments in teacher hiring and adaptability paid off as you moved into remote instruction.

See the complete list of episodes, which also are available as a podcast channel on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you and your school(s) would like to be featured in the Coronavirus Chronicles series, please get in touch. 

Other conversation series that may be of interest are below. Check them out!

Conversation series with educators during the pandemic

• My co-author, Dean Shareski, has started a podcast, What’s Happening?, which is focused a little more on instructional issues than leadership.
• Future Ready Schools just launched its new podcast series, Leading Through Unprecedented Times.
• International Schools Services has a webinar series called Educators Supporting Educators: Transitions to Online Learning, which features conversations with and resources from international school educators.

I am talking with schools to see how they’re responding in the wake of this global pandemic. I invite you to join me for the Coronavirus Chronicles, a series of check-ins with educators all over.

Episode 035 is below. Thank you, Melissa Agudelo, for sharing how the San Diego Met in San Diego, California is adapting to our new challenges and opportunities. I especially appreciated hearing the numerous concrete examples of how your educators extended your problem- and inquiry-based teaching models into remote instructional environments. Those stories were incredibly inspiring!

Read the blog post that Melissa referenced in this interview:

• Wearing all our hats at once

See the complete list of episodes, which also are available as a podcast channel on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you and your school(s) would like to be featured in the Coronavirus Chronicles series, please get in touch. 

Other conversation series that may be of interest are below. Check them out!

Conversation series with educators during the pandemic

• My co-author, Dean Shareski, has started a podcast, What’s Happening?, which is focused a little more on instructional issues than leadership.
• Future Ready Schools just launched its new podcast series, Leading Through Unprecedented Times.
• International Schools Services has a webinar series called Educators Supporting Educators: Transitions to Online Learning, which features conversations with and resources from international school educators.

I am talking with schools to see how they’re responding in the wake of this global pandemic. I invite you to join me for the Coronavirus Chronicles, a series of check-ins with educators all over.

Episode 034 is below. Thank you, Nancy Flynn, for sharing how Highland Park Elementary in St. Paul, Minnesota is adapting to our new challenges and opportunities. I especially appreciated hearing about your teachers’ creative efforts to use technology with your students and to also ground that usage in effective digital pedagogies.

See the complete list of episodes, which also are available as a podcast channel on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you and your school(s) would like to be featured in the Coronavirus Chronicles series, please get in touch. 

Other conversation series that may be of interest are below. Check them out!

Conversation series with educators during the pandemic

• My co-author, Dean Shareski, has started a podcast, What’s Happening?, which is focused a little more on instructional issues than leadership.
• Future Ready Schools just launched its new podcast series, Leading Through Unprecedented Times.
• International Schools Services has a webinar series called Educators Supporting Educators: Transitions to Online Learning, which features conversations with and resources from international school educators.