Dr.+Thomas+R+Hoerr

This is Russell's effort at covering Tom Hoerr. As we all do, it reflects what filtered through my ears and fingers, but hopefully you'll find it close to your recollection. Please feel free to add to the file. (I do have some extra bits I added as I was listening. You'll spot those. Sorry about the formatting: I did it in Word and it looked great, but pasting it to here is a nightmare. You simply cannot control the result adequately.)

= Tom Hoerr – Keynote Presentation = = = Tom Hoerr is a principal of a 300 strong school in eastern US. Read these notes as though the “I” is him. Some comments are added by Russell.

Quotes
Who you are is more important than what you know Often wrong, never in doubt. You think I know what I am talking about because I have an accent.

Three things which keep me awake?
· ** Have I offended the people I want to offend? ** (I need to make the //right// people unhappy. If I make the wrong people unhappy, I am just offending people.) · The principal is responsible for the school culture. · Good leaders comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted.

· ** Am I making new mistakes? ** · What kind of mistakes am I making? · If I’m not making mistakes, I have settled into a groove – I’m not learning. · If I think I have the answer, I become unsettled. · (//Of his staff//:) For all experienced teachers, when was the last time that you made a mistake. I want to see that mistake. Tell me about it. When I observe you, I would be delighted to see you making mistakes. · (//Of himself//:) If I tell my colleagues this, am I doing it myself

· ** Am I practicing the balance that I preach? ** Illustrative story: Hoerr was at a conference; it was late afternoon after several big days. The question was asked of four panellists: “How do you handle stress in your life?”

· **First** panellist: Family – photos – delve into homely interests · **Second** panellist: Athletic, stayed fit, made a commitment to keep his body in good nick. · **Third** panellist: Read and wrote lots: kept his head alive. · **Fourth** panellist: a high school principal who doesn’t handle stress very well. The problem: overly absorbed with trying to lift performance from excellence to perfection. //__His story__//: “We have a problem with cafeteria trays not being put away. 95% of kids do, but 5% don’t, and that’s not the perfection I want. Moreover, I have white kids who are being served by a black staff. The student attitude towards staff by the 5% is appalling. I can’t accept that I won’t get them to willingly put away that last 5% of trays. The trouble is, by striving to get from 95 to 100, I go nuts. Worse, I think I’m making sure everyone else goes nuts with me.”

Any leader who is hoping to achieve 100% success amongst the people being led is in a serious state of self-disillusionment or is a stress ball waiting to explode! · Perfectionism tends to develop the negative: it hones in on the //imperfections//! The focus is always on the deficit. It says far more about the perfectionist than those perfection is being sought in. · Russell: my cousin is a highly successful farmer with a very comfortable life style. His formula: he has figured out that doing farming very well gives very good returns. He figures he gets at least 90% of what he could expect to get from his land and animals. He has also figured out that to take that 90% to 100% would double the amount of work he would need to do, increase his expenses, and stuff up that lifestyle! No thank you!!! · There seems to be a recurring message here!

Teachers are the key factor in determining the quality of a school. Parents respond in terms of loyalty if they are repeatedly exposed to wonderful teachers.

Teachers need to be better at the end of the year than at the beginning of the year – every year. My job is to help teachers grow, not to help them be happy. For if they grow, the odds are they WILL be happy. I need to create a context in which everybody helps one another grow. The leader’s job is to facilitate and support everyone’s growth.

The leader’s own growth is key. We MUST take care of ourselves. We **must be** changing ourselves.

THOUGHT: **What if faculty meetings were voluntary?** We should apply the same principles to adult learning as we do to kid learning? We often make adult learning boring, stultifying, seat-driven, didactic, non-engaging… //we would fire teachers who did this!// · Faculty meetings are NOT the time to share information. That is a waste of everybody’s time. What if we used that time differently? · Faculty meetings do NOT belong to administrators – they belong to everybody! The agenda must be staff driven, and I (//the// principal) am just one member of that staff. · Faculty meetings can be lead by people OTHER THAN the administrator. · Faculty meetings should not focus on content but on process. We have talked about such things as: · // What is joyful learning? // · // Issues about schooling important to me as a parent? // · Faculty meetings should be meaningful and informative: departments sharing with each other what they do: creating a community picture of a school that we all contribute to. · ** I want faculty meetings to be learning meetings. **

Leadership is about Relationships
How much time do you spend on relationships, knowing that this time is well spent. The key to being a good teacher is to have a relationship with the kids.

Possible book to read: “**The Checklist Manifesto**”: Atul Gawande. Surgeon: his premise is that every procedure should have a check­list against which you measure that it has been done successfully. (Are there checklists for teaching?) One surgery checklist item says, “Staff introduce themselves.” They drop their masks and briefly touch base with each other. He reports that this very simple exercise consistently changed surgery from being an autocratic hierarchy to a collaborative team. Q. How many times do I assume that everyone is on board as a team? Is there a hierarchy? How do I flatten it?

How does all the technology affect leadership?
· Access to information has changed the hierarchy. Once, WE knew. Now others do. · Email has removed personal distance and awe. · Distrust of major institutions – politicians, business leaders – flows downhill to schools. Parents used to think we knew lots: that’s why we were teachers. We don’t have quite that status anymore. We need now to have the teacher/leader act as a group binder that takes the whole group into knowledge. · Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: Allan Collins and Richard Halverson Most people today assume that universal schooling will always be with us, but of course, most people in the 17th and 18th centuries probably assumed that apprenticeship would always be the dominant form of learning. Just as reading was made necessary by the printing press and arithmetic, by the introduction of money, so computer technologies are changing the very ways we think and make sense of the world.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Leaders must change
· We need less reliance on edicts and go-it-alone solutions · We need more: · Focus on collaboration · Distributed intelligence: how well you can use the resources around you, i.e. the people? Identify what you don’t do well and find the people who can: utilise them: use the people whose skills supplement mine so that I can harness that power. Read Daniel Golman who wrote: “Hired for IQ but promoted for EQ” //Have a look at this discussion on EQ I found:// [|//http://www.time.com/time/classroom/psych/unit5_article1.html//]

Change is not easy
· If your proposed change does not engender opposition, it is probably not meaningful change. · The best leaders of the future know when (and when not) to play their executive chips.

· ** Your decision, my decision, our decision. ** Nothing is worse than asking for input then doing the opposite. Part of success is knowing when to pose a situation for a shared solution or an executive solution. This is a question every leader should be thinking about, especially those who actually hold the highest authorities?

Collegiality is the Key
If the students are to grow and learn, so too must the adults. The leaders #1 job is to create a setting in which everyone grows, yet they must ensure they are growing too. (Analogy: In a plane, the hostess teaches everyone how to don the mask. Yet, in an emergency, her instructions say she must put on her own mask first if she is to be effective.) Collegiality can be: · Teachers talking together about students · Teachers talking about curriculum together · Teachers observing one another teach · Teachers teaching one another · Administrators and teachers learning together //Add the word “productively” to all of these…//

H E A L
H: Collegiality begins with **hiring**: group gets input into the hiring process because my expectation is that this will be a team, and teams need relationships. E: What are the collegial **expectations** for faculty members? Collegial support should be explicit, understood and anticipated.  A: Administrators: **abdicate**, **assign**, and **accept**. My teachers need to contribute to all layers of the way this school works: most importantly in the teaching/learning construct. L: **Learning** by everyone is the key to student success. Share when you have blown it.

Failing Wisely
· We don’t teach kids how to fail successfully, how to respond to failure. Schools need to teach this. · Applies equally to kids and to adults · How you define intelligence has an effect on how intelligent you are. Interesting: you tend to protect your understanding of your own intelligence, sometimes working hard to maintain this. Emphasis on looking smart to yourself. · A growth mindset is a malleable quality: a potential that can be developed. · A growth mindset is resilient: fixed mindset is not.

Praise effort, not intelligence. Praise the verb, not the noun. “You were able to **methodically solve** that really well” //vs “//You have solved that. You are really smart.”

** In a good school, students learn. In a great school, everyone learns. ** When this happens, schools become learning, organic communities in which everyone gains.

Leadership is creating a culture in which everyone learning becomes an expectation.

//Russell//

For me there were some great messages for our schools and cluster. At this stage of our cluster the key is Collegiality. **"If the students are to grow and learn, so too must the adults."** For our teachers we have to be very careful to open their eyes to growth. Our teachers are doing many excellent things already and we do not want to diminish or undervalue this work in our approach.
 * John here: **