Hi, this is jethro, host of transformative principal! You can reach me @jethrojones on twitter or at http://transformativeprincipal.org/ Today is episode 253 and I am so excited about what I am going to share. My school is rocking and rolling in an amazing way! We are positively impacting kids not just academically, but socially, as well. It’s fantastic. In fact, I’m much more proud of our soft skills growth than I am of our academic success, because today, kids can learn anything anywhere! Much of that growth is happening in Synergy, which I will talk about later. But first, everyone is always asking, how do we get our schools to change. You’re listening to this podcast because that is what you want to know! In the fall listener survey there were about 90% of my listeners so far who said they wanted to learn more about the school change process. Well, I’m going to tell you the secret. Ready? Here’s my four-step process guaranteed to bring about school change: Vision Communication Empowerment of faculty, parents, and students Continuous improvement First, vision. Where there is not vision there is death. Do you want to be “just another school?“ No! That’s why you’re listening to some guy in Alaska describe how his school has dramatically changed over the last 18 months If you go back to episode 1001 of Transformative Principal you will see how we did a ton of stuff at my last school. The same is happening here, with one notable exception. Everything that we are doing is centered around a vision for personalized learning. If it doesn’t have to do with personalizing learning for our students, I don’t touch it. Our vision is clear. We are going to give kids what they need when they need it. That is personalized learning. Our vision is clear: if something doesn’t contribute to personalizing learning, we don’t waste time on it. Whatever training we do goes back to personalizing learning for our students. We have a ton of new stuff happening in our school this year. Why? Because we are personalizing learning. Math - project-based learning Science - switching between 7th and 8th grade teachers each quarter-long unit to give kids choice and voice in their learning. So, let’s talk about how all these things happened. Step 2: communication When I got hired, I came up and met the staff at the end of the school year. I talked at length with a few of them, and started communicating over the summer more extensively. There was a lot going on. When I got to the school, I met with every teacher I could to ask, “What should we start, stop, or continue doing?” I got a lot of feedback from that. There weren’t a lot of opportunities to talk with parents, yet, but those that I did shared some of their concerns. The biggest thing that I learned in my four months’ research was that there were a lot of problems. It was tough coming into the school. I did a survey at the end of the school year, and when I asked a question about culture at the school, only 2 responses were something positive. All the others were negative. ALL the others were negative. This was tough for me. As a side note, one of the ways you measure culture is through little things, like how many people sit together at district-wide professional development. At our PD on Monday, we had the biggest group we’ve had sitting together. It’s working. We also had a school district strategic vision and big push from the school board and superintendent to personalize learning for our students, which is what I really wanted to do in education anyway! After all this research, we needed a direction. Many teachers responded to another survey that they wanted to be known for something. They had different ideas, but they desperately wanted to be known for doing something that no other schools were doing. So, with their input, I created a vision for where Tanana would go in four years. Here it is: We would fulfill our school district’s strategic vision by becoming the most personalized school in t