March - 2017

Dealing with "Toxi-Colleagues"

You’ve tried everything with a “toxi-colleague” in your organization: 1. Killing them with kindness. 2. Ignoring them. 3. Bucking them. 4. Silencing them. 5. Changing them. 6. Being open to understanding their own pain (about something that you are unsure about) because we try to believe that there is a root cause for every action, reaction, or inaction. Yet, nothing works (and they probably know it too). In fact, the toxicity becomes so acidic that their actions and a

Stories ARE Research

All of the theory and statistics in the world is no match for the human journeys that we have--which is chock full of our emotions, reflections, and human hearts. In education, our own stories should direct us like a compass when we are lost or like a lighthouse when we are looking for positive changes for our students. Stories reveal relationships. They locate trends. Stories threaten the status quo and terrible politics. They beat up weak arguments and amplify the meek

Recognizing the 5 Symptoms of “Change Illness”

We have all heard it before: Change is hard. It hurts (sometimes). And, change places lots of tension on our schools and organizations. What is interesting is that it isn’t really necessarily about “change” at all; it’s more about what is attached to “change” that we often don’t acknowledge. If we view change as an illness (for those who don’t want to change much of anything in our schools), perhaps we need to look at the symptoms of change before we judge anyone of not