Five for Friday, September 26-30, 2022

2022-09-27_62_Five for Friday_FINAL AUDIO

 00:01 

Hello colleagues, and welcome to the Assistant Principal podcast. I'm your host, Frederick Buskey. The goal of this podcast is to improve life and leadership for assistant principals. Today's episode of five for Friday recaps the strategic leadership emails for the week of September twenty sixth through thirtieth twenty twenty two. If you already get my daily emails, then I hope you'll find some added value here. And if you don't already subscribe, you can find a link on my homepage at Frederick Buskey com.

 00:32 

Many readers like to begin their mornings by reading the email and setting a leadership intention for the day, but please don't feel any pressure to subscribe. You're already doing more to grow yourself than many others out there simply by listening to the podcast. For the next two weeks. We're writing about the same theme each day, and that theme is why people don't do what we want them to do. I began the week on Monday by telling a story that's adopted from real life about a state that is requiring all elementary teachers to be trained in an intensive science based that's is that air quotes science based reading technique and structure their lessons in a specific format defined by the program.

 01:26 

We'll be really creative and we'll call it letters. Letters So the training requires teachers to spend 2 to 3 hours a week outside of the school day. As compensation, the state is providing a monthly stipend of 200$ and while some teachers are embracing the program predictably, many are not. I closed Monday by talking about. The incredible formula of m - V divided by East, which is motivation equals value divided by effort. What I love about this formula is that it suggests that there is no such thing as laziness, and there's no such thing as somebody being unmotivated or not caring. Motivation is simply an outcome of the formula, the value divided by the effort.

 02:30 

So the higher the value and the lower the effort, the more motivated I'm going to be. The lower the value, and the higher the effort, the less motivated I'll be. I love this formula because it stops us from judging people, and it gets us to put on problem solver hats instead of blame hats. So just keep this in mind as we work through the next, I guess, eight nine days M equals V divided by E What's the value that somebody's seeing, and what's the effort it's requiring? Two stays, really a cautionary tale, and I told a story of a new principle that I had been working with a couple years ago, and I kept emailing them and didn't get anything, didn't get anything.

 03:22 

I had met them just briefly at the beginning of the year. Finally I talked to one of the other principals and said, hey, will you have them contact me? They emailed me and said, oh, I'm sorry I wasn't getting your emails, they were going to my spam. So we set up a time for a coaching call. And they couldn't make it and they couldn't make the next one, and they couldn't make the next one. And I was trying to figure this out and I made U this whole narrative to myself about the principle not valuing me and not wanting my coaching services and yeah, that's fine, that's fine.

 04:01 

But I had this whole narrative put together. Finally we got together and the principal came up to me and grabbed my hand and said, ah, I'm so thankful that we finally got together. I've heard so many great things about you and I have been wanting to work with you all year. And I just had to sit back and think about. In the absence of the information about why they really were so busy, I just made-up a story. And that story really was based on my own insecurities and my own experiences and sometimes neighbors negative perspectives.

 04:41 

And to the point of Tuesday's message is to help us remember that in the absence of information, a lot of times we just make stuff up and we make stuff up based on our prior experiences and our own insecurities. So that's something that we need to be really cautious of. So the first real reason that we cover about why people don't do the things we want them to do, and I guess I should have said this doesn't just have to be some big change mandate that's coming from above. This can be something like implementing a teaching strategy or following through on turning in grades in a timely manner. There are all kinds of places that this could apply.

 05:27 

So the first real reason that we look at is that. As a person that's been asked to do something, our past experiences colors our predictions for the future. If I've already been through training on a science based reading program. And it was a horrible experience. I may assume that letters is also going to be a horrible experience. And because of that negative. History I'm going to dodge out of doing it because the effort, the emotional angst and what I perceive to be the difficulty level is going to be so high that there's no way that it's worth the value. The next reason we covered on Thursday was that people may not actually have the skills that we assume they have.

 06:30 

Maybe a teacher is resisting the letters program because the content is way over their head. Maybe they started the program but got a couple hours in and. Just couldn't figure it out. Maybe they didn't have the prerequisite skills to make the program work. We might reasonably assume that an elementary school teacher would have received substantial training in reading and in literacy. But a lot of times that's not true, because we might also assume that all our new teachers have been taught how to manage classrooms, and that's not true.

 07:10 

So it's important for us to think and realize sometimes people just don't have the skills we assume they have, which of course increases effort greatly. On Friday, we looked at confusing self preservation for apathy. Let's think about a new teacher whose year is off to a difficult start. They have a difficult group of students. They don't have that background in classroom management, and they've got this huge curriculum. They're in elementary school, so they've got five different subjects to learn to teach. And now, on top of all of that, they have to do the letters program.

 07:53 

They're just trying to survive. They're just trying to survive in the classroom each day to pile on this additional burden or this additional program. Sorry, I shouldn't say burden to pile on this additional program. It's just going to collapse them. And so they don't do it. They pull back because they're just trying to survive. It's not apathy. Ok. That wraps up the first section the first week of this and we'll continue these next week. And I'm not going to do a big takeaway here except that. What we need to do when people aren't doing what we want them to do, the first thing we need to do is really pause and ask why and not jump to any conclusions.

 08:45 

And maybe that why needs to begin with a conversation with them, not an accusation, not. An aggressive kind of conversation, but just saying hey. We're supposed to be doing this right now. I notice this isn't happening. Let's talk about this. What's going on why? Also, before you go, I want to remind you that we're running a special for about 24 more hours on our apex community. If you listen to Tuesday's podcast, you hea...