Instructional Leadership: You Are What You Celebrate
This is the fourth and final post in our Intentional Instruction series for administrators. To read the first three posts in this series, click the links below:
- Part 1: Leadership for Learning: How You Can Support Intentional Teaching
- Part 2: Helping Teachers See the Big Picture
- Part 3: Three Forces for Intentional Instruction
A celebration of learning.
I grew up in a family that fully embraced the power of anticipation and celebration. My parents loved holidays and gatherings, and our home seemed to always be fully decorated for the next big event on the family calendar.
As a teacher, I carried that spirit into my classroom, and as a building principal, I worked to never forget those two profound power sources: anticipation and celebration.
As a leader of any type of organization—and particularly in any organization where you get to work with children—it is important to remember that anticipation and celebration are powerful tools.
What’s important to you?
So decide what’s important to you as a school or program leader. Ask your teachers to join you in that conversation as you work together to list the values you hold dear and the outcomes you hope to achieve, both as an organization and for individual teachers and children.
Then look at your own calendar through a lens of anticipation and celebration. What are you doing to build anticipation for children’s learning? For teachers’ learning? For the development of positive relationships?
And what are you doing to celebrate these things?
You are what you celebrate.
There’s an old saying that “you are what you eat.” As an instructional leader, you are what you celebrate. If you want intentional instruction to be a cornerstone of your program, then you need to make sure that you build anticipation for learning and then celebrate the success stories.
We thank you for joining us in this blog series and video series and wish you a highly anticipated, well-celebrated, and joyful rest of the school year.