We’ve heard all of the sayings. We’ve felt the sting of their actual meaning play out in our daily work. We accept it as part and parcel of the job. Being a school leader is lonely.

In many ways, it is an inevitability. (There’s a reason why adages and quotes about the isolation of leadership proliferate.)

We can’t take the isolation out of the job itself. You will still be the one who ultimately needs to make tough calls, who will be held responsible for results, who will be the face of everything that happens in your building, good, bad, or ugly. You will still need to shelter your team from tough issues that would only serve to distract them from their work with kids in classrooms. You will experience issues with your own co-workers that you have no peers to talk to about.

You exist in your own head much of the time. Playing out scenarios. Strategizing. Finding solutions. Uncovering root causes. Making trade-offs and compromises. Preparing how to deliver messages (and, often, bad news) to be heard and understood. Balancing delicate interpersonal dynamics to create and maintain a cohesive team effort.

This is hard stuff! And it is the nature of leadership.

But if these isolating effects are an inevitability of school leadership, giving yourself no productive outlet to deal with this isolation doesn’t have to be.

Recently, we gathered the principals and instructional leaders from all of our school partners for a community appreciation event. No agenda. No professional development aims. No expectations for next steps. No judgement. Just being in each other’s company and connecting.

The gratitude our school partners expressed for this time and space was remarkable. For at least one evening, they didn’t feel so isolated. They could talk freely and openly about the challenges they were facing and the successes they’ve seen. They received understanding, empathy, and fresh perspective.

Often, principal support, management, or mentorship can overly formalize these aims or unintentionally undercut their larger purposes — our work included. That doesn’t mean these efforts should be abandoned in favor of free-form community building as the best way to support school leaders, but we cannot forget the power and importance of peers, of an outlet, of the permission to be unfiltered and unguarded.

So go to that Happy Hour, principals! Call up that education friend who you can vent to! Grab a coffee with your old friends from your principal prep program!

And, support organizations, find ways to give principals this space without any other agenda attached.

Finding this community might just be the only way to deal with the inevitable loneliness that comes with being a school leader.

There are few things more helpful to a school leader than observing every single classroom (or at least many of them) in their school building in one contained period of time. Plenty of our school leaders do instructional walkthroughs like this and we often go with them to help them calibrate their lens for what to look for and to provide an external perspective on what they observe.

Walkthroughs can do lots of things, but they can’t do everything.

Too often we see school leaders trying to look for all of their “look-fors” at once, expecting to see every single instructional practice they’ve ever discussed with their teachers happening no matter what part of the lesson they’re seeing. As an additional pitfall, some try to use walkthroughs as a substitute for deeper, more meaningful observation and feedback for teachers; or they’ll use them as a proxy evaluation for teachers and possibly inundate them with heaps of action items expected to be met by the time the real thing rolls around.

The best walkthroughs are none of these things entirely, but can contain elements of each of these purposes (just often not in the way that first instincts lead most principals to act on what they see during walkthroughs).

The best walkthroughs are focused, formative, and for targeted communication only.

1.) Walkthroughs must be focused.

If you are looking for everything, you’re seeing nothing.

Your teacher rubric is extensive, you have many important instructional priorities, and your teachers need to work on lots of things. But you cannot reasonably observe all of these things simultaneously. The more things you observe for, the less you actually see in a classroom, especially in the 5–10 minute snippet of each classroom you’re likely to see during a walkthrough.

Identify a very clear focus for your walkthough. Is it alignment to a clear learning objective? Great! Walkthrough just for that. Is it classroom culture and management? Great! Walkthrough just for that. Is it structuring lessons with a purposeful lesson structure? Great! Walkthrough just for that. Is it rigor of student engagement and thinking? You get the picture.

There is no way you could bring any level of depth or scrutiny to your observations during a walkthrough if you were trying to see all of these things, so zero in and focus, focus, focus on what you really need to look for.

2.) Walkthroughs must be formative.

You want to see an accurate picture of regular classroom instruction, the kind that your students get on a daily basis when you’re not in the room. You want to see teachers’ real attempts at trying on new instructional practices, which might not (likely won’t) work for them right away. You want information about what further support you need to provide to your team to improve your priority area.

Teachers need to feel safe to try something new and make mistakes in your presence. They need to know that you are observing them to get a snapshot of their classroom, not to pass judgment on everything they do (95-99% of which happens when you’re not around).

For all of these reasons, your walkthrough data cannot and should not be used as a formal evaluation.

Use it for what it is — information. Partial? Yes. Quick? Yes. A snapshot? Yes. Invalid? Absolutely not, as long as you don’t try and make it something it isn’t. Don’t judge yourself or your teachers too harshly (or praise them too effusively) based on what you see on a walkthrough. You now have verifiable indicators of what is and isn’t happening in classrooms that can and should inform your next steps and help you assess the effectiveness of the steps that you’ve taken to support and develop your teachers.

3.) Walkthroughs must be for targeted communication only.

You should communicate what you see during walkthroughs — in a purposeful, targeted way that shows your analysis of the state of instruction in your school and what you’re going to do about it.

The tendency here is sharing everything — “complete transparency” — but that can actually do more harm than good. Trying to communicate broadly, to each individual teacher, from a leadership activity that is designed only to gather high-level, school-wide trends in classroom instruction is a great way to send mixed messages and break trust with your teachers. They’re not designed for the purpose of broad individual feedback for every teacher in your building, and you shouldn’t force them to serve that function.

That said, aggregate trends (and what you’re going to do about them) should definitely be delivered to teachers! This is targeted communication. Let them know what you were looking for and what you saw across all classrooms — then share your analysis and plan for moving forward.

• What did it mean to you? What did it not mean to you?
• Where did you see teachers taking “productive risks” and making progress in your focus area?
• Where do we go from here? What further learning will we do? What additional support will you provide?

Being transparent on this school-wide level through targeted communication builds a lot of trust in you as the instructional leader of the school.

Walkthroughs can do lots of things, but they can’t do everything.

If you make your walkthroughs focused, formative, and for targeted communication only, then they can show their true power to you as an instructional leader and help you forge a clear path forward for developing your teachers.

Instructional Walkthroughs: What Are They Good For? was originally published in Your Leadership. Leveraged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We like to accumulate wins. We need to accumulate wins. The satisfaction of crossing something off of a list, marking it complete, adding it to our professional tool belt is thrilling. And volume seems to be the name of the game in education these days. The more priorities we’ve accomplished, the better we must be, right? And the faster we do it, the stronger we are, right?

Its not uncommon, however, for those same priorities that we have proudly displayed in our Trophy Case of Mastery to crop up again next school year, next month, next week...

It’s also not uncommon for us to veer from the real priorities and hack them into tinier and tinier bits just so we can put something, anything, in our win column, such that our wins have lost any real meaning.

Instructional leadership is rife with opportunities to log false wins and dwell in the illusion of real progress.

We must actively avoid falling into this trap. Here are 3 “Re-”s you should consider before you re-prioritize:

Recommit: You set your instructional priority for a reason. There was some data, observational evidence, analysis, underlying condition, or other factor that led you to publicly state, “This is the thing we need to be great at in our classrooms.”

Recommitting requires you to look long and hard at your efforts to change the underlying conditions that led you to this priority. Do you have definitive evidence that those underlying conditions have fundamentally changed in the direction you wanted — because of your concerted efforts in this area? Important problems don’t solve themselves over time; they require focused, sustained efforts.

If you see indications that the underlying conditions have improved, but you can’t point to specific strides you’ve taken, you’re probably looking at false positives and noise hiding the signal that called to you in the first place. What’s that noise hiding? Is it covering up guilt you’re feeling because of lack of real, intentional efforts? Shame for getting distracted by other things? Are you trying to find a win at all costs just to check something off?

When you find yourself here, acknowledge it — to yourself and your teachers. Restate the priority. Recommit to paying active attention to it. Resist the urge to claim a false win or hack it into a smaller, more winnable bit. You need to attend to this priority, not a different one.

Redouble/Refine: You’re seeing it! Teachers are doing it! It’s working! Wait… You saw it, a teacher did it, it didn’t not work…on that one walk-through you did. This is not a win; it’s getting a base hit in the top of the first inning. There’s a long way to go before this can be considered a win on this instructional priority and our urge to check it off and move on is strong.

Take stock in your progress and stay the course, even amplify your efforts or make some midstream adjustments to your approach. Where have you seen success? Has that success been prolonged or one-off? Who has it not worked for? Specific teachers? Specific kids? Specific circumstances?

This is the trickiest position where the re-prioritization urge is strongest, but what needs to happen here is significant analysis, active monitoring, and broader accumulation of little victories through more and more precise efforts on your part. If you move on when you find yourself here, you are setting yourself up for frustration when your next walk-through shows a regression in this area. Redouble your efforts; they’re starting to work.

Reinforce: Now you’re really seeing it! For real. Other people are seeing it too. It’s not just when you walk into the classroom, but you’ve got valid evidence that your instructional priority is living and breathing without your constant, personal oversight. It’s taking root in your school and moving from “what we’re working on” to “what we do.”

Is it possible to move on now? Layer in an additional priority? Maybe — but what you really need to do to move this priority from instructional adolescence to adulthood is nurture and reinforce it.

Your efforts need to change considerably but the priority remains the same. Share success stories. Praise innovation. Highlight the impact of teachers’ improvements in the priority area on the underlying data and conditions that led you to prioritize it in the first place. You’re no longer looking for flaws in execution but for shining stars in outcomes.

If you fail to reinforce your instructional priority once you reach this stage — and move along to a new priority — you will find yourself frustrated next year when half of your teachers have reverted to old ways. Hey, at least you have a pre-made strategy that you can re-use that you know works, right?

Instructional wins are slow to truly reveal themselves. Yes, there are an enormous amount of little victories along the way (think of all of the base hits the World Series Champions have throughout all 1,458 innings of regular season baseball!), but the trophy doesn’t get added to the case until much later. Recommit, redouble/refine, and reinforce before you re-prioritize your instructional efforts.

Time for New Instructional Priorities? Think Again. was originally published in Your Leadership. Leveraged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Teachers leave. Good ones. Bad ones. Great ones. They leave. And when they leave, it forces us to reckon with the conditions that led them to their decision and what we can do about it.

As the surge of teacher activism around the country over the past couple of years has indicated, there are larger political and systemic forces at play. Class sizes, teacher salaries, access to support staff like nurses and social workers, volume of time and priority given to standardized tests. The list of concerns is long and valid.

These are all things that need to be addressed to keep teachers and elevate the profession, but these fixes rest largely at a systemic level. Yes, there are some minor tweaks a savvy administrator can make to ease these concerns, but the roots of these issues lie outside of our direct control as school leaders. You can’t increase your budget to pay people more. You can’t boycott the state tests. You can’t add a librarian without cutting other staff somewhere else and creating a ripple effect on class sizes, prep periods, or additional duties for teachers.

So are our hands tied as school leaders? Do we let the policy makers and activists sort out the details and resign ourselves to playing the hand we have been dealt? Should we get used to a constant churn of teachers and the sting of losing the very best?

Not at all. These are convenient scapegoats, but they are red herrings for us as school leaders. There are still many micro-level factors that play into our teachers’ retention and personal satisfaction in our schools. (And let’s be honest, there isn’t a teacher out there who isn’t at least nominally aware of the systemic problems they’re walking into in the teaching profession. If the macro-level factors were exclusively to blame, they likely wouldn’t be in your school in the first place.)

On an individual level, the conditions, culture, and environment we establish inside of our schools can shape a teacher’ intrinsic motivation to thrive. Daniel Pink, in his book Drive (which he has also given a great TED Talk about) lays out three concepts that people crave, which lead them to productive and personally fulfilling careers: mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

Mastery, or the itch to keep improving at something that’s important to us;

Autonomy, or the desire to be self-directed; and

Purpose, the sense that what we do produces something transcendent or serves something meaningful beyond ourselves.

When great teachers leave our schools, we should not ignore the macro-level systemic force at play, but we should primarily turn inwards and examine the micro-level school conditions over which we have control.

Mastery: It can be very challenging to continue to push your very best teachers. The simple fact that they are your best teachers indicates that they will not be satisfied reaching a plateau or stagnating in their practice, making it all the more important that you send the message that you can continue to push them.

Have you created time and space for continued, personalized learning for all of your teachers — whether that’s in their own instructional practice or other related skills they want to develop? Or is coaching, observation and feedback, and rigorous conversation about classroom practice something that only happens with your lowest performing teachers? Are you unintentionally sending the message that yours is a school where you are content with teachers reaching some basic plateau (one which your best teachers have already surpassed) and that you have no real means to continue to feed their need for continual mastery of their craft?

Autonomy: It’s a fine line between being seen as currying favor with certain teachers and providing differentiated leadership and management techniques to your team. But that’s only how autonomy appears on the surface. At the heart of the matter is not a desire to fly solo, go rogue, or not have to follow any rules and expectations; the desire for autonomy is an innate urge to know, “Am I trusted?”

Have you set up expectations for teachers to safe guard against the lowest common denominator or to set an inspirational target towards which to everyone must strive? Can meeting expectations be quickly assessed with a yes/no assessment or does it require the exercise of professional judgment and an in-depth, mutual conversation to accurately evaluate? Do you even know enough about what’s happening in everyone’s classroom to engage them in this conversation as trusted professionals? Do teachers have the space to make mistakes, learn from them, and adjust — how do you react when things don’t go perfectly?

Purpose: Ask your teachers why they got into teaching. You’ll hear responses that are transcendent, personal, inspirational. Now ask them what they believe is the purpose and mission of your school. (Not just what the written mission is — you know, the one with “college and career ready” in it somewhere — but the lived purpose that shows itself through your actions and priorities as a school leader.) The greater the distance between your school’s perceived purpose and teachers’ personal motivations, the greater the likelihood for tension.

Are your actions and priorities sending an unintended or undesirable message about the larger purpose of your school and what you truly care most about? Have you given your best teachers opportunities that appeal to their larger sense of purpose and recognition for contributions that scratch some larger itch? Have you worked to coalesce your teachers’ understanding of your school’s purpose around a common, transcendent vision or does your leadership make them feel like a cog in a machine?

When great teachers leave, you must resist the urge to blame external factors and look inwards instead. Not to cast judgment on yourself, but to find the lessons that lie within the circumstances that are entirely within your control as a school leader.

You may not be able to pay them more. And you may not be able to abandon standardized testing writ large. But you can attend to how your leadership encourages mastery, autonomy, and purpose in your teachers so that more and more great teachers make the decision to stay instead of leave.

When Great Teachers Leave, Look Inwards was originally published in Your Leadership. Leveraged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Instinctively, we know this. We can probably recall at least a handful of teachers from our own educational experiences that, now looking back with our educator’s lens in hindsight, we would call excellent. (Not just the ones we liked the most at the time who we thought were awesome.)

Are any of them carbon copies of each other? Do any of their methods and practices feel prescribed? If we were to apply our current definition of excellent instruction from the schools where we teach and lead, would any of them check all of the boxes?

It wasn’t their adherence to specific practices that made them excellent. It was the effect they had on you as the learner, the experience they created for you as a student. Excellence was defined on the impact of their efforts, not their personal inputs.

Why then do we approach instructional leadership fixated almost exclusively on teachers’ inputs to define excellence? This runs counter to everything we ourselves experienced as excellent instruction in our own education and everything that we intuitively know to be true about great teaching.

This is not meant to suggest that we abandon all efforts to have a coordinated set of instructional practices that we collectively pursue within in our school buildings. Quite the opposite, in fact. Knowing our “look-fors” is a necessary start, but merely an insufficient beginning, to identify excellent instruction.

We do know that some things work better than others for many teachers who employ those practices with their group of students. These are a great place to begin. And we should clarify and communicate which practices we hypothesize will likely be best suited for our specific students’ learning needs and the larger educational philosophy that we aim to espouse in each of our schools. But our assessment of whether or not a teacher performing these actions as we have prescribed or as “best practices” have dictated cannot stop at observing whether or not the teacher checks off these boxes.

We must look beyond the surface level of a teacher’s actions to where we know excellent instruction truly resides — the impact on students.

What is the effect that we are aiming to having on our students by employing those practices? Not the improved test scores at the end of the year or even “mastery” on an exit ticket at the end of the lesson — but right now, the immediate effect on students sitting directly in front of us engaged in the hard work of learning. What is the instantaneous impact we are looking for?

This is the more important aspect of excellent instruction to envision — the immediate instructional experience of our students. Inputs alone mean mean very little without this context and can lead to a lot more false positives about excellent instruction than the creation of powerful learning experiences we seek.

Envisioning Excellent Instruction was originally published in Your Leadership. Leveraged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

Yogi Berra was full of logical-but-comically-nonsensical, overly literal turns of phrase like this, and this is one of my favorites.

As classroom teachers, we are confronted with hundreds of decisions a day, from the tiny and inconsequential, to the large and far-reaching. Without having the time and awareness to fully consider these decisions and the impact of our choices, we tend to instinctively classify them as either/or decisions and force ourselves to compromise by choosing one path that short changes some aspect of our teaching. We’re at a fork in the road, but we’re not “taking the fork.”

Many of these metaphorical forks involve the CULTURE in our classrooms.

Take for example a situation where you are having a difficult time with classroom management. Students are not working with their peers very well. They’re getting off-task very easily when asked to work with even one other person and then it’s hard to pull them back to anything productive for the rest of class. And working with materials? Forget about it… But, in an upcoming lesson, there is an incredibly important learning activity that will require them to work in a small group with some manipulatives to really understand the day’s objective. Do you choose to go forward with the lesson as planned knowing that students will likely be unproductive (and you will probably have a huge headache at the end of the day)? Or do you choose a less impactful learning activity that avoids groups and manipulatives altogether?

It’s a cultural fork in the road — and you’ve laid out an either/or decision. Sacrifice culture or sacrifice learning.

But there’s a third “taking the fork” option that breaks apart this dichotomy: consciously build the CULTURE you need to support the best methods for learning. Rather than compromising either culture or learning, you’re taking the fork by rejecting the idea that you need to choose between them. It’s not the simple or the quick solution, by any means, but it’s the right solution in the long term.

Another scenario (one that I actually saw in a classroom this week and explicitly heard the teacher explain its compromising effect): You’re having a hard time delivering full-class instruction to students. They aren’t engaged. They don’t pay attention and you often are talking over them to try and catch the few kids who are still trying to listen. And by the time they get to practice, they haven’t actually taken anything meaningful in that can help them show mastery of the objective. But when they’re in small groups or you work with them one-on-one, you can keep their focus for longer periods of time and at least some of what you’re saying sticks with the kids. They’re better behaved in group or partner work too — maybe not 100% and maybe not all on-task, but much better than when they’re full class. So do you choose to continue unproductive whole group instruction that you know is a cultural mess? Or do you move to all small group instruction that requires you to deliver the same lesson multiple times to multiple smaller groups of kids and leave 3/4 to 4/5 of your class unmonitored but behaving in a “tolerable way” while you do so?

The teacher in this scenario definitely did not take the fork in the road. The CULTURE of her room had a compromising effect on her instruction when, shockingly, she decided that only doing small group instruction was the only path she could take at this fork in the road.

Other problems have already begun to appear down this path. More forks. More compromises. And there will continue to be more forks in the road until she decides to TAKE the fork by refusing to compromise.

Where is CULTURE putting forks in the road of your classroom? Are you responding by making compromises to your instruction or your culture? Or are you taking those forks in the road by refusing to follow the false paths the forks makes you consider?

The Compromising Effects of CULTURE was originally published in Your Leadership. Leveraged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We hear it every year. “These kids just don’t know how to act in a classroom. I shouldn’t need to tell them what to do! They should know by now!” The notion that teachers “shouldn’t need to” teach and enforce behavioral expectations is a pervasive myth that teachers are guilty of spreading among themselves and cuts to the heart of why too many teachers overlook the CULTURE element as an essential piece of their practice.

But think about that argument for a second. Saying “I shouldn’t need to…” implies that at some point, someone should have taught them how to behave. You’re indicting all of your students former teachers for not doing their jobs (and next year, the teachers in the grade above you will be indicting you for the same thing). This argument also implies that those same exact expectations they they should have been taught long ago should apply to every classroom thereafter for all of a student’s schooling existence! You’re guilty of assuming that behavioral norms are completely static in both time and circumstance, effectively saying that there is only one specific way that all kids should be expected to behave always.

Sounds kind of illogical doesn’t it?

(I know your next retort is that it’s the parent’s job to teach them how to behave and I could go on and on about how flawed that argument is as well, but I won’t right now.)

The commonly heard definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. So if we keep saying this year after year, maybe the problem isn’t with the kids, but rather with what we’re doing (or not doing in this case).

The fact of the matter is that kids of all ages, whether you are a second grader or a senior, need clear expectations set for how they should be operating. And they need to hear it time and time again. And have it reinforced. And have it upheld consistently. And over time, probably long after they’ve walked across the graduation stage, realize why the adults in their lives did that for them. (They’ll thank us later…) There’s a reason we don’t consider kids to be full-fledged adults yet — they haven’t yet fully internalized how to make the best decisions for themselves. They need loving and capable adults to set those expectations and uphold them.

So, no, you probably shouldn’t need to tell what your expectations are to the class yet again. But that doesn’t deny that fact that you DO need to.

The next time you find the thought “but I shouldn’t need to…” cross your mind, consider the larger CULTURE you’re seeking to uphold. And get in the habit of preempting that situation and responding if (and when) someone inevitably should know what to do.

“I shouldn’t need to…” was originally published in Your Leadership. Leveraged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What does “productive” look like in your classroom? Go ahead, really think about it. What are students doing? How is time spent? How is time not spent? What distinguishes a productive day from an unproductive day in class?

No matter who you are, where or what you teach, my guess is that your description of “productive” had something to do with not wasting any time. In work as high-stakes as ours is, every minute, every second matters. Time is the one thing we wish we had more of and can never seem to get enough of.

But have you ever analyzed how time actually gets spent during a class period?

What tasks and activities become unnecessary time-sucks? Things that chip away at the class period but aren’t actually used for any productive learning purposes?

Here are a few that I tend to see frequently in classrooms I visit:

• Handing out papers
• Turning in papers
• Getting kids working at the start of the period
• Transitioning between activities that involve different materials (i.e., put this away/take this out, clear your desk, etc.)
• Transitioning between activities that involve different arrangement of students in the room (i.e., moving into groups, rotating between centers, moving into lab groups, returning back to full class from alternate arrangements, etc.)
• Regathering students’ attention
• Getting ready to end class
• Sharpening pencils
• Dealing with requests to go to the bathroom
• Handling interruptions (i.e., an unexpected announcement, visitor, or student behavior situation)
• Changing visuals
• Rewriting notes on the board

Need I go on?

Each of these activities, though essential for the daily operations of a classroom, are not in-and-of-themselves productive learning activities. And each of these activities tends to take waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy looooooooonnnnnngggggeeeerrrr than needed.

I challenge you to keep a timer on hand during a full school day. Start the timer whenever one of these procedural necessities that is eating into learning time begins. Stop the timer whenever you’re fully able to return to productive learning activities. (Yes, this includes time leading up to and following that dreaded and oh so counterproductive threat, “I’ll wait…”).

How much time is lost during a normal class period? A regular school day? The results may shock you.

Think of what you could accomplish during that time. How many more practice problems? How much deeper of a discussion? How many more opportunities for a student to explain his or her thinking? Then work to minimize that total time count at every chance possible through smarter procedures, tighter management, increased encouragement and investment in preserving every ounce of learning time, and a little bit of hustle and urgency from you and your students.

When it comes to CULTURE, every second matters. Especially the wasted ones.

When Seconds and Minutes Matter was originally published in Your Leadership. Leveraged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve all had a student enter our classroom, take their seat, and immediately put their head down. You can see it in their face — today is NOT the day. Our empathy kicks into high gear, we ask how we can help, and ultimately allow them to do less during class than we’d normally expect.

This feels right for the student. But does it feel right for the CULTURE of our classroom?

If we look closer at the CULTURE element, we might begin to wonder if our empathy is working against us. Uphold a Positive and Productive CULTURE: Clearly set expectations for positive and productive behavior; address all non-positive and non-productive behaviors.

By allowing our “bad day” student to have a different set of expectations for what productive looks like for him or her, we have chiseled away at those expectations for everyone. Tomorrow, Susie, who is actually feeling just fine, just wants a day off from your class. She knows that you let Jimmy sit in the back and keep his head down yesterday. She plays the game. You cave and give her a different set of expectations from the rest of the class.

It’s a slippery slope from there. What’s to stop Timmy, and Tommy, and Ariel, and Sandra from doing the same thing the day after Susie does it? Maybe all of them at the same time?

This is challenging because in a situation where a student really is not in the right physical or mental space to dedicate their full brain space to learning, we want to be empathetic and help them, but we also cannot undercut the larger culture of productivity we’re working to build.

Have some go to responses in these situations. “Do you need me to call the counselor so you can talk?” “Would you like an escort to the main office so you can call home?” “I want you to feel better, but when you’re in here, you’re working with full effort just like everyone else. Are you well enough to stay? I’d like you to try and we can check in again in 10 minutes to see how you’re feeling, but I need you fully engaged just like everyone else.”

Don’t let one student’s bad day turn into a series of bad days cause by an eroded CULTURE that you unintentionally caused.

Bad Day Syndrome was originally published in Your Leadership. Leveraged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2005, the late author, David Foster Wallace, delivered the commencement address at Kenyon College. It was entitled “This is Water.” (Google it and give it a listen; you won’t be disappointed!)

He starts by telling a story about fish swimming in a fishbowl. One fish floats by two others and asks them, “How’s the water today?” After the questioning fish swims away, one fish looks at the other and asks, “What’s water?”

Wallace use this story as an allegory for daily life as a working adult in today’s fast-paced, consumer-driven society, but the major message is an important one — the boring, mundane things that surround us, which so often go unnoticed, are the things that life is made up of. And we must choose how we respond to these things. We can choose to ignore them, or we can choose to resent them, or we can choose to be aware of what it is that surrounds us and view it consciously, productively, and happily.

The same can be said of the CULTURE in our classrooms. It’s hard to define a classroom’s culture, but it’s easy to experience it. This is water.

Spend even a little bit of time in a classroom as an outside observer and all you can see is the water that surrounds every student, every action, every moment. But exist within a classroom’s culture day-in and day-out, like a teacher, and it’s easy to lose awareness of the water. Swimming through your day never noticing the constant presence of the culture around you, for better or worse. This is CULTURE.

The truth of the matter is that we create the cultural water of our classrooms. And if we don’t actively create it, the classroom will fill with cultural water anyways, whether we like it or not.

This week, ask yourself, “How’s the water today?” If you don’t like it, it’s within your power to change it.

Week 6 Element Spotlight: CULTURE was originally published in Your Leadership. Leveraged on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.