Lead Learner Round Table

Maximizing the many benefits of using social media in your school, with guest Dr. David Geurin (@DavidGeurin).

Twitter is a powerful way to broadcast your school's message to a large audience. We share seven keys to making the most of this platform.

The number of educators sharing ideas and relevant news articles on Twitter is absolutely exploding. In fact, of the over half billion tweets posted each day, over 4.2 million of them are education-related. That equates to over 3,000 new education tweets during the few moments it took you to read that first paragraph. With just a few simple steps you can use Twitter to significantly grow your professional learning network and, in turn, access a wealth of knowledge for your school community.

Making a new hire is one of the most important acts that we go through as a school. This process presents the opportunity to bring a quality team member aboard. We share some keys steps that are integral to ensuring your best chance to make that "home run" hire.

As teachers and principals we are always looking for quality resources to capture the imagination of our students. Doing it in a way that doesn't cost us a lot of time or money can be a challenge. This episode focuses on two quality ways to spice up your class and do so without having to spend hours of time planning and creating new resources. Linda Kamp, a second grade teacher from Phoeniz, AZ, joins us to discuss her Teachers Pay Teachers store and shares her secrets for how to get the most bang for your buck through this online marketplace of teacher-created resources.We also look at how to add over 10,000 books to your classroom library. Oh, and as a teacher, you can have this all for FREE.

With the ever-increasing emphasis on accountability, data collection, and high-stakes testing the focus is often drawn away from those elements of our culture that have long made schools a central source of pride and community. Leo Ganahl, principal at Halls Ferry Elementary in the Ferguson-Florissant School District located outside of St. Louis, has a passion for his school and his neighborhood that is making an impact on the students and community he serves. In this episode he shares some of the things his school is doing to establish trust, grow a sense of pride, and build relationships between school and community.

Formative assessment can sometimes get a bad rap. The more we can simplify the process as teachers and remember the real purpose behind it in the first place, the more apt we are to use it on a daily basis. Which, in turn, will allow us to reap greatest benefits from this small investment of our time. In this episode, we explore how to get the most out of our formative assessments while requiring the least amount of setup and planning. We also look at Socrative, a powerfully simple and FREE web-based tool for formative assessment.

We delve into the art and science of implementing a one-to-one initiative in your school. We break down what the research says and what teachers and principals are doing to get some traction in using these new technology resources in a way that benefits student learning and builds teacher confidence. We also have a new item in the Ninja Toolbox that will make giving feedback a breeze and knock off hours of time spent during this important but painstaking process. Regardless of how committed you are to writing instruction, nobody loves going through the editing and revising process especially when you’re doing it for one hundred or more students. Finally, we have a solution that helps teachers significantly cut down on this time-consuming part of the writing process.

We know behaviors that get reinforced and rewarded are statistically more likely to occur with regularity than those that are not. With this knowledge we must ask ourselves what types of behaviors and actions are we reinforcing in our schools? Are they the types of actions we want our students to partake in each day in order to set them up for success? In this episode, we meet with Dr. Shane Dublin, principal at Bolivar Middle School in Missouri, to discuss some unique ways his school is celebrating student successes. He also shares one Ninja Tool that he could not do without.

In this debut episode, we take a look at the challenges of differentiating instruction for our most advanced learners. This population of students is often overlooked as we focus our efforts on answering the first three PLC questions, and tend to neglect the fourth and final question. Why is this important? What are some effective strategies being used by teachers? Join us as we look at what some high-performing schools are doing.