Whose Permission Are You Waiting For? An Educator’s Guide to Doing What You Love

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by my friend, William D. Parker. William is principal of Skyatook High School in Oklahoma and was the 2011 Oklahoma Assistant Principal of the Year. now a nationally known speaker. He is the host of the Principal Matters podcast and the author of two books, including Messaging Matters.

[00:37] Announcer:

And now our feature presentation.

[00:39] SPEAKER_01:

William, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:41] SPEAKER_02:

Justin, I am so excited to be with you and thanks for inviting me.

[00:45] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's get right into it. And thanks for being here. Why does messaging matter? Why do we have to be proactive and be thoughtful about messaging in our schools?

[00:56] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I've been a school administrator since 2004, and nine of those years I spent as an assistant principal, and the last four years I have been a high school principal. And in all of those settings, as I have learned the art and science of transitioning from classroom instructor to school-wide instructional leader, I've realized that there are amazing things that are happening in our schools every day, not just my own, but in many of the schools with whom I connect, and I've been able to connect with a lot of people online through resources like yours, Justin, and through your podcast and other resources, through Twitter, through Facebook, through conferences. And as I'm speaking to school leaders in my own state and across the nation, I'm discovering unbelievably awesome things that are happening in our schools that not a lot of people know about.

[01:48]

And I think part of the problem is, is that In the humility of being educators, we often don't want to brag or celebrate about the successes because we're so focused on finding solutions for things that still need to be improved. And when you multiply that across an entire nation, then I think we have a crisis. And the crisis is this. We are losing the battle when it comes to public relations. about our schools. And I think that could not have been brought home more poignantly than in this last election.

[02:16]

And when you look at the current politics and the conversations that you hear about schools today, you often hear that we are in decline or that we're in failure or that things aren't going well. And I know that most school leaders in the hard work that they do often feel overwhelmed or overworked or overcommitted. But I also know that in their jobs, they're seeing amazing things happening around them. And so five years ago, I made an intentional commitment of my own to start celebrating the positives that were happening in my school so often that they could drown out any negatives that were happening, not because I was ignoring the negatives, but because I felt like we need to be celebrating what's happening in our schools. You know, Rick DeFore's book, In Praise of American Educators, he cites the statistics that most Parents in American schools, when they look at surveys of what do you think about our nation's schools, will give schools Ds and Fs.

[03:10]

But if you talk to people in their local communities, the overwhelming majority will give their own local school an A or a B because they're right down the street from them and they love their kids' schools. But when you talk about policies or public opinion or resources that are going to come to schools, that larger perception matters. And so the reason I decided to put this book together, Messaging Matters, is because I believe that as school leaders, we're in the pilot seat and we hold the most amazing positions for seeing the awesome learning opportunities, the awesome connections, the awesome engagement that's happening in our schools. And when we can commit to communicating that outside of our schools, within our schools and outside of our schools, then we're going to create a momentum that drives that positivity and drowns out the negative. So I'm already getting too excited talking about it, Justin, so I'm going to let you jump in and ask more questions. But that's the motivation that helped me think about putting this out in book form.

[04:04] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And I think it's such an issue that we've even gotten to the point in our profession where we say, stay out of the newspaper, right? We tell ourselves, we tell our colleagues, hey, good luck staying out of the newspaper. But really, your message is that we need to do the opposite. We need to proactively get into the newspaper for good things rather than wait for the bad things to take place.

[04:24] SPEAKER_02:

For sure. And, you know, it was really difficult for me to figure out how to organize all of these ideas into something that was succinct and helpful. And so I tried to divide the conversation into three parts. How do you do this with students? How do you do this with teachers? And how do you do this with parents?

[04:40]

And not just parents, but your community. And by community, I don't just mean your local community either. I mean the world. And so how do we take these messages in each of those spheres? Because I think each of them is equally important. Obviously, the most important people in our schools are the ones whom we're educating.

[04:56]

And so figuring out ways to positively message with our students, to communicate expectations, to celebrate their great work is important. But the same thing works with our teachers. To keep them motivated, they need to know what's happening outside of their own rooms. Because so often, because we're isolated from one another in the work that we do, even when we're collaborating in PLCs or data teams, we're not watching each other in instruction every day And so being able to share out among your colleagues, hey, look what just happened down the hall or look what's happening over in so-and-so's room today or look what amazing things these kids are producing among your school community. That's beautiful. And then being able to broadcast that out to your community and to the world.

[05:39]

It just builds this amazing momentum among your entire school community of all the wonderful things that are happening in classrooms among students, among teachers. and then broadcasting that out to others outside of your school community too.

[05:51] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's think about some of the typical things that we might do in a school to recognize students, to celebrate their work, to recognize teachers and thank them for their contributions. We have things like student of the week or student of the month or honor roll. Or in our staff newsletter, we might highlight teachers who took the lead on a project or had a really innovative lesson. What are some recommendations that you have in the book to kind of go beyond those traditional kind of standbys of student of the week, student of the month and things like that?

[06:20] SPEAKER_02:

Well, first of all, I think it's important before you jump into the practical to-dos, because there are lots of them. I also think it's important to understand the mindset of communication. And so I explained in Messaging Matters that if this is a book that you're picking up because you want a lot of practical ideas of how to increase communication, you may have the wrong book because I do talk about those in every chapter. But I'm also really interested in the mindset that we have as school communicators. And let me just demonstrate that with a quick story. Justin, when I was a boy, my dad would take me outside and he would set up a telescope so that we could look at the stars or we could look at the moon.

[06:56]

And I learned at a very young age that you can only see one side of the moon from the Earth. And I know those of you that are science buffs already know this. And so when we had our first lunar orbits by astronauts, the amazing thing for them was that they were actually getting to rotate to the other side of the moon and see parts of it that we can never see with our naked eyes or from this side of the Earth unless we fly an object to the other side. And so often I believe that school leaders – see all of the moon. In other words, we're not obviously able to see every perspective, but you get to see as a school leader the perspective from the teacher's perspective, from the eyes of students. If you're a parent, you get to see that perspective as well.

[07:39]

You're seeing parts of your school that no one else gets to see. And so often it's easy as school leaders to forget others can't see the moon. They can only see parts of that perspective. And so if they're going to be able to see the full orbed experience of what's happening within your building that needs to be celebrated and acknowledged, you are responsible to communicate it because you're the one seeing it. You're that astronaut flying on that other side of the moon. And so before I jump into practicalities of ways you can do that, I think first you just have to adopt the right mindset, which is how can I walk into my building every single day with the perspective that what's happening in here has to be communicated around because no one else has that special perspective that I get to have as I walk through my school or my assistant principals do.

[08:27]

And so it's a privilege and it's an honor to have that perspective. But when it comes to specific tools and ways to do that, I think that we have to move even farther beyond just students of the month or teachers of the month, which is super important. But I think it's committing to a daily and weekly broadcasting of those things. And so You know, when I walk through my school, I'm always carrying something to take photographs with because I'm going to make sure that I'm capturing moments of things that are happening so that I can feed them out through Twitter or we can put them up through Facebook. But I'm also encouraging my student leaders to adapt to that mindset. I'm encouraging teachers to adapt that mindset.

[09:03]

And yes, you have to honor and protect people's FERPA rights. And we make sure that if we have any students whose parents don't want images of them broadcasted, that we respect that. But the vast majority of our people love it when we share out Information that's happening among our kids. So I think mindset's a big part of it But I also think that practicing it consistently Broadcasting those things consistently builds momentum We had some students a few probably about a month and a half ago now who on their own decided that they wanted to try something innovative and encouraging good behavior among their peers and so a girl went into one of our girls bathrooms and she took a post-it note and she wrote a little note that said I you are loved. And she placed it on the bathroom mirror. And then she put some post-it notes on the side there with a pen that said, uh, leave a thought, take a thought.

[09:56]

And so I had a teacher that came down to me at the end of the day and she said, well, um, I know you don't go in the girl's bathroom, but I just got to tell you that there's this mirror in there and it's getting covered with positive notes. Things like you shine like a diamond or don't let things get you down or believe in yourself. And so this created a movement pretty soon. They had put paper all over the walls in there. And we have an entire wall that is filled every single day with notes that girls are leaving to encourage one another in our school. Now, we're a school with 750 kids, 9 through 12.

[10:29]

We're a Title I school. 30% of our kids are Native American population as well. We have a fantastic culture and community here. But we're just like every other school. You would not typically find kids leaving encouraging notes in bathrooms. But this began a momentum.

[10:44]

And so what did we do to encourage that? Well, you better believe as soon as I had an opportunity to get someone in there with a camera, we were taking pictures, we were putting on a Facebook, we were sharing it with teachers, we were letting parents see that. And I even decided for the first time, I've never done this before, to boost that post through Facebook just to see how far it would reach. And by the end of that week, we had 65,000 impressions just on that one Facebook post. We had the local newspaper that published that story. And then our news station from one of our TV news stations from Tulsa called us and said, can we come up and put this in the news?

[11:15]

This is just fantastic that your kids have created a movement of kindness. The manuscript for my book had already been written before all that even happened, Justin. But it's such a great example of what I'm trying to explain in creating a culture where you have such an emphasis on promoting positivity that when others adopt that, whether it's teachers or kids, that you already have a way, a platform in place to broadcast it out throughout your community and to the world so that other people can be encouraged by great things happening among your students.

[11:44] SPEAKER_01:

That is an incredible story. And I remember coming across that on your blog or possibly on your Facebook page and just floored me when I saw that. The idea that students could start a positive, taking something that's really almost entirely negative or at least destructive, bathroom graffiti, and just deciding to make that a positive and not just a one-time thing, but make it something that others are invited to add to and take to a whole new level. So that is, wow, what an incredible story.

[12:17] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and I'll give props to one of our students whose name is Taylor Anderson. She's a junior, and it took me a while to find that first girl, but I kept asking the students until they finally kind of tracked it back, and I pulled her in, and we had the conversation, and I said, Taylor, thank you for starting a movement. And where did you get that idea? And she said, you know, Mr. Parker, I was at a Bible study a few nights before, and we had been sitting around as students just saying, what can we do to encourage one another? And I just thought, why don't I put a note on the bathroom mirror and just see what happens?

[12:47]

And it took off. And so we encourage our kids all the time to come up with great ideas, and our teachers do too. But sometimes you can't plan those things, but you can certainly cultivate the right atmosphere so that when they do happen, you can capitalize on it. And so I'm not saying to exploit our kids by messaging about them, but I'm saying to capitalize on those moments because, again, as school principals, we are the chief communicators for our school. If we're not owning that responsibility, then who is?

[13:19] SPEAKER_01:

So I appreciate your comments on mindset and kind of readiness to recognize those things when they're happening. What are some of the habits? You mentioned taking pictures, being ready to take pictures. What are some of the other habits as a leader that have helped you notice those things when they're happening? I mean, obviously, if a teacher comes and grabs your arm and says, hey, look, check out this bathroom mirror, you're going to see that. But what has helped you become more attuned to those things that are worth communicating about, that are worth celebrating?

[13:47] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's such a great question. I don't know if I've been asked that before, Justin. So I think the first way I would respond is I think one of the important practices is mindfulness and, you know, being present when you're with students, because so often in our responsibilities as principals, we're correcting behavior. We are anticipating situations. We might be trying to make sure that we keep our locations safe. That's all a part of our responsibilities.

[14:14]

But I think sometimes we forget the mindfulness that's necessary for us to Just stop and pause and recognize there's something happening here that needs to be noticed. For instance, when I go into a classroom for an observation, you know, in the old days, and I still am tempted to do this sometimes, I immediately want to jump to my to-dos. I want to get out my checklist. I want to open my laptop. I want to log into my evaluation platform. I want to have all my tools ready.

[14:41]

And what I've had to force myself to do over the years, and this has been helpful, is to pause and be mindful. Just stop and look around at the room and the teacher and the instruction and the kids' faces and identify what kind of learning is going on. And then I can begin evaluating in my mind or with my tools. But first I have to be mindful of what is exactly happening, which also means sometimes getting into the room and walking around it and asking kids themselves, what are you learning? Give me feedback. Teach me back what you've been learning.

[15:13]

So I think part of it is just having that mindset of, When we're involved in the practices that we already do as school leaders, making sure that we're intentional in those moments to make the most of them.

[15:24] SPEAKER_01:

Well, thinking about that, that kind of dark side of the moon phenomenon, whereas as leaders, we see a lot that other people are not privy to. How do we as leaders? people who are deep into instructional leadership and to what specifically is happening in the classroom, how do we translate that into things that resonate with parents? Because, I mean, if we have a, you know, a teacher who is implementing some advanced technology teaching technique that we've been working on as a staff, and we're really jazzed about that, you know, that might not translate incredibly well into a parent newsletter, you know, in ways that seem obvious to us. What are some ways that you've found, you know, to kind of get ourselves looking for those things that will resonate with parents in a meaningful way, even if they are kind of nerdy in the educational world?

[16:14] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think there's a lot of ways you can do that. And, um, I'll give you a couple of examples. One of my partner principals from another building at a couple of months ago, we were at a school board meeting and he brought a teacher team in to demonstrate some of the data teaming and some of the practices that this team was doing with, with their students. And I thought that's brilliant because he's, instead of him standing up and delivering, you know, a presentation or talking about, you know, these great things. And then you see the, you know, the eyes glazing over, He's bringing in a team of teachers who are going to communicate it from their own practice. And it's going to be a whole lot easier to understand and a whole lot more meaningful because they're seeing these teachers owning and explaining their practice, which is beautiful.

[17:01]

I've done the same thing with students where I bring students into board meetings and have them talk about some of the initiatives that they're working on as students so that the board members are hearing directly from them because they're the products of our educational environment. And so I think sometimes it's just a matter of rethinking how you're communicating because so often we are the spokespersons for our schools, but it's important for us to encourage the others on our team to be communicating too. One of my teachers this year decided she's a technology teacher and she loves technology tools. And so she started to put together her own weekly blog called Tuesday Tech Tips. And so she shares these out with teachers, but she also posts them on her website so that anyone, whether it's teachers or community members, can be learning the latest technology tools that she's teaching her kids.

[17:54]

And so there's so many different ways that we can be doing this than how we've done it traditionally. At the same time, I would say that it's important for you to have a consistent practice. And so it's great to have good intentions, but often if we don't have a schedule for those intentions. They never happen. And so I made a commitment four years ago that every single week, my parents were going to hear from me through a weekly newsletter. And this isn't just simply a one sentence.

[18:24]

Hey parents, here's what's going on. It's not simply a reproduction of our calendar, but it is a weekly celebratory. This is what's happened in our school this week. And here are the photos and the images of your kids doing these things. Because I want them every single week to have this menu of images and photos and ideas of the great things that were happening with their kids at school. And so that has been an intentional and scheduled commitment.

[18:52]

It's been a time-consuming one. I can tell you that I do those at the end of every week. And there are some times where I'm here after school or when my teachers have left the building and I'm trying to make sure I can wrap up that week with that great summary. But I can tell you, Justin, in the four years that I've done that, The overwhelming communication that I have had from parents since doing that has been the positive reflections that I have. When I'm in the community and I'm at a basketball game or I'm at a band event and a parent comes over to speak to me, in the past I would often have anticipated they've got a problem that they want to share. And that's okay because that's my job to listen to those concerns.

[19:31]

But now the overwhelming number of those conversations begin with, I just saw this in your newsletter. Thank you for the newsletter. Oh, by the way, I was so excited to see this happening. And so they're already hearing from me. So they're already having a conversation with me before we've ever even started talking because I initiated it. And I'm making sure that they're hearing about the positives happening in our school so that if they do have a concern, it's within the perspective that their concern fits into the perspective that all these other awesome things are happening with their kid in my school.

[20:03]

And so that concern fits into that perspective instead of that concern being the only perspective.

[20:07] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I love that kind of structure that you've created there. And I found the same thing to be absolutely true, that I had to have a structure for myself. And I literally used a template. I had a Microsoft Word template that I would simply type in and paste photos into. And if I didn't have any photos and I didn't have any good news to put in there, there was a big empty hole in my newsletter until that was done.

[20:29] SPEAKER_02:

Well, and I've been using some tools that have been helpful too. I actually do this in tandem. We have a classroom teacher who has one hour that he has students practicing desktop publishing. And so we feed when teachers have photos or announcements or celebrations or things that are happening, we feed those out to our staff, but they go directly to him as well. And so his students are actually taking those same images and stories, reproducing them into that desktop publishing bulletin and creating their own weekly newsletter that they share back with me. And so when I write my newsletter to parents, I'm typically writing out a summary of great things that have happened, and I link it to that newsletter so that all those images are there.

[21:12]

And sometimes I'll put images of my own in. But I also use, if I can go techie on you for a little bit, I use MailChimp as a way to push out my newsletters to parents. And even though I have access to all of their email addresses through our student information system, I've decided to use MailChimp because it gives them an option to of unsubscribing if they get tired of the communications or staying on after their kid's gone. Because believe it or not, I actually have some parents that want to continue to get those even after their students aren't in the school any longer. So we have, you know, 700 and something kids in my building, but I have over 800 subscribers on that MailChimp account just for that weekly newsletter that we do through the school.

[21:50] SPEAKER_01:

That's great. And do you do the blog to email?

[21:53] SPEAKER_02:

You know, I have a completely separate MailChimp account for the blogging that I do. And so that the blogging that I do on principal matters, which is you can find it at my website at William D. Parker dot com. That's a completely separate account. So because most of the content that's on there is specific for school leaders and the kinds of conversations you and I are having right now. But the stuff that we do through our own school website.

[22:15]

And through the school newsletter, I send out through a separate Mailchimp account.

[22:18] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, because I know a lot of schools are thinking about blogs or want to do blogs. And that's a very easy way if you want to do both to just get it all out there at once, you know, post it to the blog. And I've seen principals do that. And that's beautiful, too. Of course, you've got other schools using s'more.com and kind of purpose-built services for schools like that.

[22:35]

And then, of course, good old-fashioned email or Microsoft Word or whatever works for you. But I think what matters is that consistency, that parents are expecting it, and that, as you said, that it's kind of setting the tone. So even before someone has an issue, before they seek you out at the basketball game or whatever, they've got good news to discuss with you. I think that's so powerful.

[22:57] SPEAKER_02:

I do too. And I think it's good to duplicate. It's okay to duplicate content. In other words, if you've got something that you're sharing out in your newsletter, then it's okay. If it's also being shared out through Facebook, through an email, through Twitter, through any of those other platforms that you have. And so I just, I'm a huge proponent that over saturating content, the communication is okay because not all parents use the same means of communication.

[23:22] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Messaging Matters. And William, if you could kind of wave a magic wand and get all school leaders everywhere to do one thing, to take one action, what would that be?

[23:33] SPEAKER_02:

That's a great question, Justin. If I could wave my magic wand, I think that what I would tell principals to do is give yourself permission to love your school. And I know that sounds odd. but sometimes I think that we forget that, yes, we are organizational leaders and yes, we are instructional leaders. And yes, sometimes we are transformational leaders because those are all the different hats that we wear. But there's a reason that we serve these students every day and that we champion the causes of our teachers every day and that we want to build the kinds of schools where our own children attend.

[24:09]

And that's because ultimately we love our students. And, you know, John Wink did a fantastic, Twitter initiative a couple of weeks ago called hashtag love my school day. And I was probably more excited about that initiative than I've been about anything in a long time because it's so resonated with what I've been trying to communicate in my own writing and in my own blog and in this book, which is that we have to be the champions of what's happening in our schools. And so that day, as I was looking through those Twitter feeds and that evening after school, I opened them up and tried to just read every one of them, which was impossible because because there were thousands of principals across the nation that were just tweeting photos all day long of their beautiful students and their awesome teachers and their amazing programs. And it just made me so thrilled to see, especially, and I love all education.

[25:03]

I have friends in the private sector, in the public sector. I have friends that are proponents of charter schools and friends that are not. And I, you know, those are peripheral to me because I love education. But as a public school administrator, it was such a beautiful thing to see these thousands of administrators all across and teachers all across America just celebrating that they love their kids and they love their schools. And so I think that the most important part of messaging is is yes, that we adopt strategies to do it well, that we're intentional about how to do it, that we think specifically about how do we do that when it comes to students, how do we do that when it comes to teachers, and how do we do that when it comes to our parents and our community. And my book breaks all of those down into those different categories.

[25:46]

But I think overall, if I could wave that magic wand, it would be that each of us is committed to that kind of celebration and that kind of acknowledgement and that kind of communication all the time. Because I believe if we were, what kind of image would public school have? If all of us together were united in that consistent, incessant, overwhelming drumbeat that our schools are wonderful and these kids are loved and these are the amazing things that are happening in here, we will never stop having to deal with negatives and we'll never stop having to put out fires and we'll never stop having to do the more difficult parts of our job. But if we could change the conversation to those things, then...

[26:27]

We can be having great conversations about instruction. We can have the kinds of conversations we need to have with policymakers about resources and support because they're going to want to be a part of that. And so my message about messaging is just that, Justin. And so I know your principal center listeners are on board with that too. So I just want to encourage all of you to keep loving your school and don't be afraid to let people know it.

[26:50] SPEAKER_01:

Well, William, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[26:53] SPEAKER_02:

It was my pleasure.

[26:55] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[26:59] SPEAKER_01:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with William Parker about getting the word out about the positives that are taking place in your school with students, with staff, with parents? You know, one of the things that really stands out to me is this idea of the telescope and seeing the dark side of the moon that the rest of our staff can't see. And I really appreciated William's comments about needing to point that telescope and needing to guide people to see the great things that are taking place every day. Because from our perspective as leaders, they're obvious, right? We see the great things that are happening. People come and tell us.

[27:37]

But if we hold onto that and don't pass it on, if we're not incredibly intentional about getting the word out, then no one will know. People will miss out on all the good news that's happening. So I wanna encourage you to do what William has done in his school and develop habits and develop systems around getting the word out. Take those pictures. Give yourself a deadline every week to get those pictures into your newsletter. Train your staff and your parents to read that newsletter.

[28:04]

And if you need to, make sure that there's some essential information in that newsletter, such as the schedule, so that people will open it and read it. I'm a big believer that putting all of that in one newsletter is a great way to get people to look at it. So if you're not already communicating on a weekly basis with your community, not just here's when we have school and here's when we don't, but from you, from the instructional leadership team, what are the great things that are happening and what's on the agenda? I think there's no substitute for that kind of communication. Personally, I did that with just a Microsoft Word document that we would send out as a PDF. I would these days recommend a service called smore.com, S-M-O-R-E.com, which gives you some great email sending abilities as well as mobile responsive newsletters that are really easy to build.

[28:49]

So check that out if you need a technology solution for that. But whatever you use, communicate and be intentional about it and build habits around that communication because so much great stuff is happening in your school and you're the one to get the word out.

[29:05] Announcer:

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