Week One Lessons and Week Two Look-Ahead

Week Two Look Ahead

St Louis: The College School, Maplewood Richmond Heights Middle School, Crossroads Prep, New City, and Elementary School Heads Association.

Chicago: Francis W. Parker, Chicago Latin

Culver: Culver Academy

Indianapolis: Park Tudor

How You Can Benefit:

Share this blog site with your faculty and staff; join the conversation with your comments; link to someone I have reported on; follow on Twitter at #EdJourney or @GrantLichtman.  I am happy to report two of my followers made a connection already last week to share on some leadership ideas. This is the least expensive PD opportunity ever!

Whipple Hill joins as sponsor:

Very happy and honored that Whipple Hill asked to join and help with trip expenses.  Many of you know Whipple Hill as a leader in the development of web and integrated information systems for schools.  I am looking forward to meeting with them in New Hampshire next month and making a video about the journey to that point.

Lessons from the road after one week of my Journey of Learning:

1. Make sure your wife loves you before you leave for 12 weeks.
2. I am really good at map reading, but I could not do this trip without GPS, a smartphone, and Google.
3. Travelling cheap and worrying about saving a few bucks makes sense on the routine stuff like where to stay and what to eat, but not on the one-off problems like a blown tire.  Pay the price and get on down the road.
4. Not many of the problems on a trip like this measure up to the problems most people in the world deal with every day of their lives.
5. The Kansas prairie is not flat; there are bumps, draws, and ripples. The road turns.
6. If you work at a school and you don’t believe that the world has fundamentally changed in the last ten years, you probably are not in a leadership position.
7. I am constantly humbled by the passion of almost all educators. The percentage that constantly wants to improve at their trade must be really high relative to most other professions.
8. Some schools are pushing forward.  Their road ahead is unpredictable, messy, and will never be easy.  But they will be increasingly relevant; I don’t worry about those on the path.  I worry about schools that are not pushing forward at all; irrelevancy may be closer than they think.

Thanks for following and sharing!