Use Friday Focus memos to motivate and engage your staff every week, and help create a school culture focused on the growth of students and teachers. Easy to understand and implement, Friday Focus memos offer an effective and efficient way to improve student learning, staff development, and school culture from within. Written by educational consultant and former principal of two award-winning schools, Jeffrey Zoul, these memos focus on topics such as active learning, high expectations, gratitude, test preparation, and more. Zoul provides 37 teaching and learning memos, one for each week of the school year, for principals and other administrators to reproduce and circulate among their staff. Zoul prefaces each memo with stories from his experiences as a teacher, coach, and assistant principal in the K-12 levels. You can also write your own memos, with guidance on possible topics and teacher takeaways.

Use Friday Focus memos to motivate and engage your staff every week, and help create a school culture focused on the growth of students and teachers. Easy to understand and implement, Friday Focus memos offer an effective and efficient way to improve student learning, staff development, and school culture from within. Written by educational consultant and former principal of two award-winning schools, Jeffrey Zoul, these memos focus on topics such as active learning, high expectations, gratitude, test preparation, and more. Zoul provides 37 teaching and learning memos, one for each week of the school year, for principals and other administrators to reproduce and circulate among their staff. Zoul prefaces each memo with stories from his experiences as a teacher, coach, and assistant principal in the K-12 levels. You can also write your own memos, with guidance on possible topics and teacher takeaways.

This book is designed to provide educators techniques and strategies to build a positive school culture throughout an entire school year.

This book presents a series of cultural situations that could occur within the first one-hundred days of a school year: responding to entrenched vocabularies and behaviors, addressing professional and instructional bad habits, enacting alternative teaching scripts, leveraging a policy blindside, redefining the goals and practices of teams, and implementing outside-the-box programs. Each cultural situation offers a new school leader the opportunity to redefine the goals, values, and practices of an entrenched school culture—the Central High way. Administrators reading the title of this book may view one hundred days as an arbitrary number picked out of administrative thin air. I argue that disrupting and replacing organizational and instructional routines is a race against time. Every school day that goes by without some sign of creative destruction is one more day that comfortable organizational and instructional routines live on in main offices and classrooms. The idea for this book originated from a question I asked a former student of mine who had just signed a contract to become the principal of a high school. We were discussing the complexities of changing a school culture when I asked the following question: “What would you do on the first day in your new office to change your school’s culture?” The response to that question described a series managerial routines that all new administrators have learned to perform as they move from the classroom to the main office: organize the office, meet staff, tour the building, write a newsletter, examine data, and visit community venues. Nothing in this conversation described strategies for redefining the beliefs and values of an entrenched school culture. With this conversation in mind, I made it a point in my formal and informal contacts with school administrators to always ask the question: “What would you do in the first day in your new office to change your school’s culture?” The most common responses involved reviewing district documents, touring facilities, meeting staff, listening to stakeholders and managing systems. In each conversation, school leaders populated their responses with the current jargon of school reform: learning communities, data mining, standards-based curriculum, differentiated learning, common core standards, formative assessment, race to the top, continuous improvement, etc. While these responses encompass reasonable behaviors on the first day in the main office, not one of these actions possesses the capacity to connect educational values expressed in school mission statements—why are we here—to daily organizational and instructional routines. Each activity gives the appearance of leading, but produces no connections between beliefs, values, and practices. Although none of these responses would make or break a school culture, they do represent a pattern of thinking and behaving that holds out little possibility of fundamentally changing a school’s culture.

This book displays 37 “Friday Focus” memos, each of which provides insight into a specific aspect of teaching and learning for all to reflect on throughout the year. Friday Focus memos address the principal’s responsibility to shape the school culture, provide intellectual stimulation, and communicate effectively. The memos are organized around the school year and provide educators with a wide variety of insights into how to improve our schools. They are typically between 500–1,000 words in length and can be sent out via e-mail to each staff member – not only to the teachers but also secretaries, custodians, and cafeteria workers. A vehicle for school improvement, the Friday Focus memos provide a step-by-step plan for staff members and principals to work together as change agents for school improvement.

This is a must-have resource for busy educators involved in creating, improving, or reevaluating their school mission statements. The authors provide numerous examples of mission statements from a diverse range of preK-12 schools, offering readers an extremely valuable resource for developing an understanding of various themes and ideas in American education today - all to be better prepared to formulate their own schools' mission statements. Whether you are preparing for accreditation reviews, seeking a broader knowledge base, or are engaged in policy discussions, this practical, readable guide is packed with valuable information to help you reach your professional goals.

This publication offers sage advice on how to close the achievement gap by addressing the "attitude gap" that often affects underperforming students of all racial and ethnic groups.