Walkthrough Tools for a Busy Principal School leaders, you are pivotal to everything that happens in your school! Budgets, schedules, staffing, parent concerns, bus problems, student discipline, board reports, a leaky roof . . . a tall order! Too often, instructional leadership slips away under the urgent requests of any given day. Yes, teacher observations […]
Blog Posts
Technology Use with Guardrails: A Balanced Approach for Young Learners
What Do We Do with Screen Time? If you lead an elementary school, you have likely heard the concerns: Screens harm children’s eyes. Screens rewire young brains. Young children need books and blocks, not tablets. The media shares research and warnings; parents raise these worries at back-to-school night and parent meetings; teachers raise them in […]
Three Tools to Improve Student Behavior
It All Comes Down to Executive Function Positive behavior is dependent upon strong executive function. Punishments and bribes will do little to change behavior. We have to get to the root causes of behavior problems. A very important root cause is a lack of developmentally appropriate executive function. Academic achievement depends on executive function. Mental […]
Designing Elevated Tier 1 Instruction for All Students
What’s with the Tiers? Tier 1 is the instruction every student gets, every day. It has to be designed to work for a room full of students with different backgrounds, different language levels, different prior knowledge, different cognitive abilities, and different readiness . . . all at once. That’s a tall order, and it’s also […]
Preparing Students for a Workforce That AI Is Already Reshaping
In 2022, most of us had never heard of ChatGPT. By 2023, it was a household name. By 2024, it wasn’t just ChatGPT anymore, as AI-powered tools were everywhere, generating images, building presentations, and writing code. It’s 2026, and AI isn’t a trend educators are watching from a distance. It’s already sitting in every classroom, […]
