Work Smarter, Not Harder

"Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things."

-Peter Drucker

In education there are some things we have in abundance-- mandates, frustrations, passion, love for our students, etc.-- while there are clearly other things that tend to be in short supply--most notably, time and money. In order to address the myriad of mandates, standards, and needs that fall on our shoulders, we have to be both effective and efficient in everything we do. This is an ongoing process of evaluation and re-evaluation of everything we spend time on. 

As we head into this second semester, I encourage all of you to evaluate the assignments that you are giving in class. Make sure that each and everything you are spending time and energy to have students complete gives you a clear picture of what they have learned. If you have an assignment that is not completed by a student, and you don't feel like that missing assignment represents a meaningful piece of assessment data that you need to determine where they are in terms of mastery of your content, I would urge you to re-evaluate giving that assignment. Not only does this ease the burden on our students, who increasingly don't have support at home, but it also eases the burden on you, both from a grading perspective and a tracking down missing work perspective. My goal is for us, as a building, to move to a model fewer, more meaninful and often more dynamic assessments for our students. By cutting down on how much we assign, we can free up our time to focus on digging deeper with the assignments we have left. I will say that I am seeing this more and more as I walk through your classrooms and just anecdotally as a parent of two students in this building. This is clearly something we are doing, so this isn't some new directive I am giving so much as an encouragement to keep moving in that direction because I think we are on the right track.

This mindset doesn't just apply to classroom assignments. I want to continue to evaluate our building level proceedures. Recently, the topic of advisory has come up, and I have had conversations with many of you already about my desire to look more closely at how we can get more out of that time. Be thinking of what you believe could be fixed with advisory as that will be our topic of discussion during our February Faculty Meeting.

We have a limited amount of contact time with our kids; we owe it to ourselves and to them to make sure we are making the absolute most out of it.