Hello, I hope you are doing well. I’ve been thinking a lot about mindsets recently, so this Coaching Letter, and maybe the next one or two, are about that. In education it seems like the notion of mindset is dominated by the work of Carol Dweck, who is a psychologist at Stanford. And she indeed has done amazing work. She is best known for the concepts of fixed and growth mindset: a fixed mindset is the belief that your abilities
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Happy October! Long-term readers of the Coaching Letter will know that I try and write something about goals every year at around this time. Goal-setting is, I think, one of the most poorly understood constructs in education. So this Coaching Letter is a re-hash of several previous CLs, especially Coaching Letter #91. Goals are not an unmitigated good. There is an article in HBR that is about the danger of confusing metrics with strategy—that paying too much attention to the target
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The Superintendents' Network, established in 2002 by Connecticut Center for School Change (now Partners for Educational Leadership), is celebrating 20 years of providing leadership guidance, support, mentoring, coaching, fellowship and extraordinary professional development opportunities for superintendents across Connecticut. Still going strongly, the Network continues to attract new superintendents while retaining experienced leaders. Though its focus has evolved to meet today’s educational challenges and current realities, its foundation and core mission remain steadfast and unchanged. Originally founded with support from the
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One of our goals at Partners for Educational Leadership (PEL) is to provide districts with conceptual frameworks for strategizing and planning – educators who have been involved with us for any length of time will recognize that as one of our hallmarks. When schools were shut down in 2020 to try and slow the spread of COVID-19, we started thinking about how to support schools in planning instructional support for students who had missed several weeks of school – we
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Kerry Lord believes you can’t ask people to do something and not give them the tools and the chance to do it – or do it well. Serving as director of Programs for Partners for Educational Leadership (PEL), she works with district leaders to address systemic inequities, coaches and mentors school leaders, and facilitates communities of practice designed to support school leaders. Kerry has spent the past 28 years as a public educator, working in San Francisco first as a
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Hello, I hope this finds you well. Thank you for subscribing to The Coaching Letter. You rock. This is a great time of year to be in New England, my family is happier and healthier than we have been since the start of the pandemic and maybe even before, and I have fascinating work with terrific people, so my life is good. Thank you to everyone who responded to my last Coaching Letter—some of those emails were quite unexpected and
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In an article published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Steven Rogelberg, Cliff Scott, and John Kello analyzed how much time American workers spend in meetings and how valuable they find such meetings. According to their research, the average American worker spends six hours weekly in meetings. These same studies suggest that managers and senior managers spend far more, participating in as many as 23 hours of meetings per week. There is limited research on how much time educators spend
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Good morning, I hope this finds you well. I know many of you just started the new school year, and many are just about to start. I know exactly that particular combination of anxiety, nervous energy, optimism and joy that accompanies the beginning of school. May all your best hopes transpire. I am writing this in the dining car of an Amtrak just south of Jacksonville, and the guy two booths down is singing along, loudly and stereotypically off-key, to
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Hello, I hope you are well and that you are reading this after you get back from vacation. This Coaching Letter is ONLY about the tools that I use to keep myself organized and (more or less) productive. This is in response to multiple requests over the last few months—it’s not like I think I have a lock on productivity, but I have spent some time trying to figure out how to make apps & extensions work for me, because
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Good morning. Today is Day One of Milford’s HQI Live!, which for me is a Very Big Deal. I wrote about it the first year it took place, and this year it’s significantly more ambitious, with 100 teachers from across the district coming together to watch teachers teach real kids in real time, sandwiched between activities designed to engage adult learners on important questions about instructional practice (What is high quality instruction? What matters in giving and receiving feedback? What’s
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