SamTastic Weekly Tip: 11/20/23 - Track Your Management Time

This week’s tip: Track your Management Time

Actually, TimeTrack already records your management time…but are you using your management data?

TimeTrack keeps record of all the events you enter. SAM teams tend to focus on instructional work, using the TimeTrack dashboard and quick links to see charts of graphs detailing the leader’s work, to improve teaching and learning. Great!

Looking at the time spent on management can be beneficial, too. This can help identify the need for First Responders. It can have other benefits, too.

Last week’s Marshall Memo detailed a study tracking students sent to the office for misbehavior in class. The data revealed wide differences in the number of referrals by teacher and reason. The study revealed a large number of referrals came from a small number of teachers. (see Marshall Meno article and links, below)

Data doesn’t tell you whether you are right or wrong. It does give you the opportunity to reflect and consider next steps in working with others. You don’t need a study to examine student referrals in your school. You can use TimeTrack.

There is a simple way to unlock your data on management work. Click the Options tab, select Management, click apply.

To track student referrals, you can create an event, select Management, Student Discipline, and associate with the teacher(s) making the referrals. For more detail, you can associate with the student, giving you data on the amount of time spent on referrals, who is being sent to the office and, importantly, frequency.

Of course, you can use NoteTrack to keep a narrative running record that will be retrievable based on the association, teacher and student.

A student referral can start as management for a leader. The time can flip to instruction if the leader uses time data to improve student learning behavior by working with teachers to better deal with student behavior in class. Working with students to improve their learning behavior is instructional. Using data to improve your work is golden.

Music Video: I Am a SAM https://bit.ly/48OCjCm

Executive Summary: SAM team Success: https://bit.ly/3rIWkZT

Data on Teachers Sending Students to the Office

In this article in Educational Researcher, Jing Liu (University of Maryland/College Park), Emily Penner (IZA Institute of Labor Economics, Germany), and Wenjing Gao (University of California/Irvine) report on their four-year study of teachers’ office discipline referrals in a large, diverse urban school district in California. Liu, Penner, and Gao drew on “exceptionally detailed administrative data” on students who got in trouble with teachers, noting that there was wide variation in what different teachers considered defiant and disruptive behavior. The study’s findings:

• Only about a third of teachers in the district ever made an office referral in a given year.

• Half of those teachers referred fewer than five students a year.

• The average referral rate was less than one student every two months.

• A small number of teachers (1.7 percent) referred over 48 students a year.

• These “top referrers” accounted for 34.8 percent of total office discipline referrals.

• The less experienced teachers were, the more likely they were to be top referrers.

• The top referrers were most likely to teach in middle schools.

• Black and Hispanic teachers were much less likely to be top referrers than their white colleagues.

• The top referrers were much more likely to refer more African-American and Hispanic students than white and Asian students.

• The top 5 percent of referring teachers effectively doubled racial referring gaps in the district.

• Those gaps cascaded into racial gaps in out-of-school suspensions.

• Only about 25 percent of top referrers in a given year were still in that category the next year, and an even smaller percent the following year.

This last finding, say Liu, Penner, and Gao, “suggest that extensive referring behavior is quite malleable,” and can be changed by coaching on classroom management – especially among less-experienced teachers. The authors encourage school and district leaders to track office referral data in real time and intervene early with teachers who are frequent flyers.

“Troublemakers? The Role of Teacher Referrers in Expanding Racial Disciplinary Disproportionalities” by Jing Liu, Emily Penner, and Wenjing Gao in Educational Researcher, November 2023 (Vol. 52, #8, pp. 469-481); Liu can be reached at jliu28@umd.edu.

SamTastic Weekly Tip: 11/14/23 - Focus

This week’s tip: Focus

Take a look at your time data:

1. Have you spent the time you intended with your Focus teachers, the staff members you identified in TimeTrack as needing you most?

2. Is the time you are spending in group meetings effective?

The SAM process is all about intentionality. Most TimeTrack users identify Focus teachers at the beginning of the school year. (Settings~Individual/Group Set-up) During the SAM Daily Meeting the team can see the time spent with each Focus teacher by going to the dashboard and clicking FOCUS. Can the leader see improved practice connected with the time spent? If so, great! If not, what is the leader going to try next?

Most principals spend more time in group meetings than any other activity. Look at your TimeTrack data to compare the time spend with different groups in your school and district. Ask if it was the leader’s intention to spend more time with one group than another. Ask if the leader can connect time spent with a group with improved teacher practice. If not, what needs to change?

It is easy for a leader to allow meetings to take far more time than intended. Working with teachers in group settings can have tremendous positive impact if carefully thought out and planned. Asking the leader during the SAM Daily Meeting what follow-up is needed after attending a group meeting is the first step. This causes the leader to be reflective about why he/she attended the meeting in the first place.

Music Video: I Am a SAM https://bit.ly/48OCjCm

Executive Summary: SAM team Success: https://bit.ly/3rIWkZT

SamTastic Weekly Tip: 11/6/23 - How to Lead in Brutalizing Times

This week’s tip: How to lead in brutalizing times

“We’re living in a brutalizing time: Scenes of mass savagery pervade the media. Americans have become vicious toward one another amid our disagreements. Everywhere I go, people are coping with an avalanche of negative emotions: shock, pain, contempt, anger, anxiety, fear.” David Brooks, New York Times, How to Stay Sane in Brutalizing Times, 11/5/23

Sound familiar? SAM teams are intentional and reflective. Have you considered how the brutalizing times in which we live may impact how you lead?

Brooks includes suggestions:

“The most practical thing you can do, even in hard times, is to lead with curiosity, lead with respect, work hard to understand the people you might be taught to detest.

That means seeing people with generous eyes, offering trust to others before they trust you. That means adopting a certain posture toward the world. If you look at others with the eyes of fear and judgment, you will find flaws and menace; but if you look out with a respectful attitude, you’ll often find imperfect people enmeshed in uncertainty, doing the best they can.

Will casting this kind of attention change the people you are encountering? Maybe; maybe not. But this is about who you are becoming in corrosive times. Are you becoming more humane or less? Are you a person who obsesses over how unfairly you are treated, or are you a person who is primarily concerned by how you see and treat others?”

The complete article is re-printed at the end of this week’s Tip.

SAM Principal and NSIP Board member Shawna Fagbuyi invited her students to come to school on Halloween dressed as their favorite character in a book. She picked her favorite author, Ken Williams, Ruthless Equity.

Would you like to see Ken’s response? https://vimeo.com/880561147/7ac1484c2a

If you haven’t read Ruthless Equity, and would like a copy, click here and we’ll send you one: https://forms.gle/QHYRLn25Y2HHCief8

Executive Summary: SAM team Success: https://bit.ly/3rIWkZT

How to Stay Sane in Brutalizing Times

New York Times, November 5, 2023

David Brooks

We’re living in a brutalizing time: Scenes of mass savagery pervade the media. Americans have become vicious toward one another amid our disagreements. Everywhere I go, people are coping with an avalanche of negative emotions: shock, pain, contempt, anger, anxiety, fear.

The first thing to say is that we in America are the lucky ones. We’re not crouching in a cellar waiting for the next bomb to drop. We’re not currently the targets of terrorists who massacre families in their homes. We should still start every day with gratitude for the blessings we enjoy.

But we’re faced with a subtler set of challenges. How do you stay mentally healthy and spiritually whole in brutalizing times? How do you prevent yourself from becoming embittered, hate-filled, calloused over, suspicious and desensitized?

Ancient wisdom has a formula to help us, which you might call skepticism of the head and audacity of the heart.

The ancient Greeks knew about violent times. They lived with frequent wars between city-states, with massacres and mass rape. In response, they adopted a tragic sensibility. This sensibility begins with the awareness that the crust of civilization is thin. Breakdowns into barbarism are the historical norm. Don’t fool yourself into believing that you’re living in some modern age, too enlightened for hatred to take over.

In these circumstances, everybody has a choice. You can try to avoid thinking about the dark realities of life and naïvely wish that bad things won’t happen. Or you can confront these realities and develop a tragic mentality to help you thrive among them. As Ralph Waldo Emerson would write centuries later, “Great men, great nations have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.” And that goes for great women, too.

This tragic sensibility prepares you for the rigors of life in concrete ways. First, it teaches a sense of humility. The tragedies that populated Greek stages sent the message that our accomplishments were tenuous. They remind us that it’s easy to become proud and conceited in moments of peace. We begin to exaggerate our ability to control our own destinies. We begin to assume that the so-called justice of our cause guarantees our success. Humility is not thinking lowly of yourself; it’s an accurate perception of yourself. It is the ability to cast aside illusions and vanities and see life as it really is.

Second, the tragic sensibility nurtures a prudent approach to life. It encourages people to focus on the downsides of their actions and work to head them off. As Hal Brands and Charles Edel write in “The Lessons of Tragedy,” Greek tragedies were part of a wide culture that forced the Greeks to confront their own “frailty and fallibility.” By “shocking, unsettling and disturbing the audience, the tragedies also forced discussions of what was needed to circumvent such a fate.” In this way, people are taught resilience and anti-fragility — to be prepared for the pain that will inevitably come.

Third, this tragic mentality encourages caution. As Thucydides would argue, in politics, the lows are lower than the highs are high. The price we pay for our errors is higher than the benefits we gain from our successes. So be careful of rushing headlong into maximalist action, convinced of your own righteousness. Be incremental and patient and steady. This is advice I wish the Israelis would heed as they wage war on Hamas. This is advice that Matt Gaetz and the burn-it-all-down caucus among the House Republicans will never understand.

Fourth, the tragic mentality teaches people to be suspicious of their own rage. “Rage” is in the first line of “The Iliad.” We immediately see Agamemnon (whom we detest) and Achilles (whom we admire) behaving stupidly because they are filled with anger. The lesson is that rage might feel luxurious because it makes you convinced of your own rightness, but ultimately, it blinds you and turns you into a hate-filled monster. This is advice I wish the hard left would heed, the people who are so consumed by their self-righteous fury that they become cruel — desensitized to the suffering of Israelis, because Israelis are the bad guys in their simple ideological fables.

Over time, I’d add, rage hardens and corrodes the mind of its bearer. It hardens into the sort of cold, amoral, nihilistic attitude that we see in Donald Trump and in many others who inhabit what the political sociologist Larry Diamond has called the “authoritarian zeitgeist.” This attitude says: The enemy is out to destroy us. The ends justify the means. Savagery is necessary. The only thing we worship is power.

Fifth, tragedies thrust the harsh realities of individual suffering in our faces, and in them we find our common humanity. I’ve always been amazed by Aeschylus’ play “The Persians.” It was performed only eight years after the major battle that would eventually secure Athenian victory over the Persians, and it was written by a man who fought in that battle. And yet it is written from the Persian vantage point and elicits sympathy for the Persians, in all their hubris and suffering. It teaches us to be empathetic to all those who suffer, not just those on our own side.

From this sort of work, we learn to have a contempt for sadism, for anything that dehumanizes, and to have compassion for the everyday people who pay the price for the designs of proud and evil men. That compassion is the noble flame that keeps humanity alive, even in times of war and barbarism. That compassion recognizes the infinite dignity of each human soul.

So far, I’ve been describing the cool, prudent and humble mentality we learn from the Athenians. Now I turn to a different mentality, a mentality that emerged among the great Abrahamic faiths, and in their sacred city, Jerusalem. This mentality celebrates an audacious act: the act of leading with love in harsh times.

As much as we need bread and sleep, human beings need recognition. The essence of dehumanization is not to see someone, to render him inconsequential and invisible. For example, over the last few decades, we in the college-educated media and cultural circles have increasingly shut out working-class voices. Many people look at the national conversation and don’t see themselves represented there, and hence grow bitter and alienated. Members of the working class are far from the only people who feel invisible these days.

The core counterattack against this kind of dehumanization is to offer others the gift of being seen. What sunlight is to the vampire, recognition is to the dehumanizers. We fight back by opening our hearts and casting a just and loving attention on others, by being curious about strangers, being a little vulnerable with them in the hopes that they might be vulnerable, too. This is the kind of social repair that can happen in our daily encounters, in the way we show up for others.

I recently published a book on the concrete skills you need to do this, called “How to Know a Person.” During a recent Zoom call, someone asked me: Isn’t it dangerous to be vulnerable toward others when there is so much bitterness, betrayal and pain all around? My answer to that good question is: Yes, it is dangerous. But it is also dangerous to be hardened and calloused over by hard times. It is also dangerous, as C.S. Lewis put it, to guard your heart so thoroughly that you make it “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

The great Black theologian Howard Thurman faced a lot of bigotry in his life, but as he put it in his 1949 book, “Jesus and the Disinherited,” “Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father.”

This is not a call to naïveté. Of course there are toxic people in the world. Donald Trump is not going to change just because his opponents start feeling warm and fuzzy toward him. Genocidal fanatics like the leaders of Hamas just need to be defeated by force of arms.

But most people — maybe more than you think — are peace- and love-seeking creatures who are sometimes caught in bad situations. The most practical thing you can do, even in hard times, is to lead with curiosity, lead with respect, work hard to understand the people you might be taught to detest.

That means seeing people with generous eyes, offering trust to others before they trust you. That means adopting a certain posture toward the world. If you look at others with the eyes of fear and judgment, you will find flaws and menace; but if you look out with a respectful attitude, you’ll often find imperfect people enmeshed in uncertainty, doing the best they can.

Will casting this kind of attention change the people you are encountering? Maybe; maybe not. But this is about who you are becoming in corrosive times. Are you becoming more humane or less? Are you a person who obsesses over how unfairly you are treated, or are you a person who is primarily concerned by how you see and treat others? “Virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is,” Iris Murdoch wrote.

One of my heroes is a woman named Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam in the 1930s and ’40s. Her early diaries reveal her to be immature and self-centered. But as the Nazi occupation lasted and the horrors of the Holocaust mounted, she became more generous, kind, warm and ultimately heroic toward those who were being sent off to the death camps. She volunteered to work at a labor camp called Westerbork, where Dutch Jews were held before being transferred to the death camps in the east. There she cared for the ill, tended to those confined to the punishment barracks and became known in the camp for her sparkling compassion, her selfless love. Her biographer wrote that “it was her practice of paying deep attention which transformed her.” It was her ability to really observe others — their anxieties, their cares and their attachments — that enabled her to enter into their lives and serve them.

It did not save her. In 1943, she herself was sent to Auschwitz and was murdered. But she left a legacy: what it looks like to shine and grow and be a beacon of humanity, even in the worst imaginable circumstances.

I’m trying to describe a dual sensibility — becoming a person who learns humility and prudence from the Athenian tradition, but also audacity, emotional openness and care from the Jerusalem tradition. Can a single person possess both traits? This was the question Max Weber asked in his classic essay “Politics as a Vocation”: “How can warm passion and a cool sense of proportion be forged together in one and the same soul?”

It’s a hard challenge that most of us will fail at most of the time. But I think it’s the only practical and effective way to proceed in times like these.