Archive for January 2013
Is your website a gated community?
Sometimes a career in communications seems like dentistry. By that I mean that the work required for good communicating is feels like pulling teeth. Such was the case with a school district that hired me to coach its teachers through a process of creating a “teacher page” on the district’s website. The district’s own communications…
Read MoreThe SCN Encourager – Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Thinking about Thinking – The Sequel Thinking about thinking is a difficult assignment. But there’s value in it – and that’s why I wrote about it yesterday. (And proved once again that writing is also a difficult assignment for me . . .) The comments I received from school communicators about yesterday’s linked podcast (from…
Read MoreThe SCN Encourager – Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Overwhelmed? Juggling many different projects? Speed up! Hey, don’t blame me. I didn’t come up with the “speed up” answer. It came from organizational guru Price Prittchett’s handbook “New Work Habits for a Radically Changing World.” In a chapter titled “Speed Up” he writes, “Organizations must accelerate or they die. We live in an impatient…
Read MoreThe SCN Encourager – Monday, January 14, 2013
20 School Safety Action Steps – Simply Stated. It’s hard work to pull from multiple resources and create a one page document that effectively covers the essentials. But somehow Kristin Tank, the public information officer for the Muskegon Area Intermediate School District (MI), was able to pull this off. (Recalling how I failed in my…
Read MoreLearning and Education: Has the Conversation Changed?
Recently I came upon a transcription of a speech Dorothy Sayers gave to the Oxford University in 1947 entitled The Lost Tools of Learning. Consider one of her opening statements: Is not the great defect of our education today. . .that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the…
Read MoreThe SCN Encourager – Friday, January 11, 2013
The NFL play-offs and your school crisis response Yesterday morning – on the very day I sent out that long overview of my recent school crisis response experience to you – I cut myself shaving. Here’s why. I was listening to Herman Edwards, the ever-energetic former NFL player and coach, on ESPN radio. Naturally, all…
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