This second interview with Bob Sonju is really great. You will
enjoy every minute of it! We talk about the following:
How to deal with cynical stakeholders.
Why people need to be ready to change to make things
better.
How to make a good school even better.
Why you wake up with panic attacks in the middle of the night
as a transformative principal.
The best time to change education was 20 years ago, the second
best time to change education is today!
The excuses we make to not make changes.
There is no such thing as an optimal time to make changes, but
we need to have a sense of urgency.
The state of Utah lost 19% of students (that didn’t graduate
with a diploma). That is 1 in 5 kids! Unacceptable!
If you don’t find a better way… You fall back to how you did it
before. We need to focus on using research-based best practices to
help our students.
The importance of the Professional Learning Communities and
Response to Intervention.
We don’t need to find new things, we just need to get good at
PLCs and RTI.
There is no quick fix for schools.
We need to remove the things that
A super quick overview of PLCs and RTI in case you aren’t
familiar with them. Based mostly on the work of DuFour and Eaker in
Learning by Doing
What a principal can do to be a transformative principal today:
Identify the research that drives your day-to-day work and
recognize the sense of urgency we have to ensure that learning is
not optional.
What he has in his office or a story: Simplify and focus. Story
about teacher telling him that he is right in pushing forward.
How to get ahold of him (He is not on the Twitter, but he is
willing to help you by giving his email address. Bob [dot] sonju at
wash.k12.ut.us)