You, as a woman, are created in the image of God. We don't know much about Heavenly Mother, so I won't speculate here, but we do know that we are created in the image of our heavenly parents. Through the act of motherhood, you can become more like them. I believe there are three spiritual gifts you can gain to be more like your Heavenl...

In the last couple weeks, a couple principals asked me, “How do I know when to work with someone and when to wish them well?” In other words, “How do I know when to fire someone?” Of course, in education, it’s usually about whether to non-retain someone more often than firing. On this subject, I listened to a great podcast on the topic...

As part of the masterminds I run for school leaders, we read books. Leaders are readers. It's important to read. I've recently started having members suggest books. Below is the set of instructions they get as they choose a book to read. There are a couple agreements for the mastermind books: 1. No education books. We all read plenty o...

For the past several years, I’ve seen some amazing things. I’ve been able to move to Alaska, win a national award, and do things I love doing with cool people. It’s pretty amazing. The one thing that all the good things have in common? Connections. I’m not talking about good ol’ boys clubs, because I often get kicked out of those. I’m ...

As I'm playing with Obsidian more and more, I am just really loving it. It's got some features that are just dynamite. Here are just two: 1. When I paste in hyperlinks from a web site, they automatically convert the link to Markdown. It goes from Hey World to [Hey World](http://world.hey.com/jethro) when pasted. Each podcast guest I ha...

I’m not a journalist. I’m not even an avid consumer of what journalists create. As I’m getting older, though, I’m realizing that I am interested more in what they offer. I’m very intrigued by Casey Newton’s Platformer, especially his article titled “The Mess at Medium.” Medium has never been intriguing to me, because it seemed to me to...

Great news! As you know, Frederick Lane and I have been doing a podcast called Cybertraps for the past several months. We hear these questions so often, • "I gave my kid a phone, now how do I keep them safe?" • "Can I take away their phone if they make a mistake?" • "My child is sexting! How can I make them stop?" • "I'm addicted to In...

I've been really struggling with the monumental task of combing through 400 interviews and show notes to find what I'm looking for. Let me describe my process here, one for myself, and two for anyone else looking for help in something similar. What I did originally, is imported all my show notes documents, which start as txt files into...

I started using Evernote in 2008, so I had left out the 2000+ notes in my post Stumbling into Personal Knowledge Management. Evernote served as a catchall for other things. The first note I create din Evernote was a DeBeers class action lawsuit document. I paid for a year of Evernote with that settlement. haha! I found this great post ...

I stumbled into something this week. In my dropbox folder is a "Notes" folder that is nearly everything that I have created over the last several years. To be honest, I'm a little surprised that it has only 1656 notes in it. It seems to me that there would be more. Maybe I lost some along the way. I've been using Notational Velocity, S...

Ten days ago, I mentioned this as an aside. But, I’m going to pursue it. I want to get a doctorate. I have for a long time. I started doing some research about getting a doctorate by virtue of the work I’ve done as a podcaster. I’m calling it Podcast to PhD. Who knows what will come of it, but I’m going to document my progress here. I ...

Too often schools see technology as the be all and end all. It hasn’t ever been and it won’t ever be. Kids thrive when they are engaged in something that matters to them. Too many schools tried to shove their brick and mortar system into their virtual environment. It was the perfect opportunity to do things differently, and too many di...

In working with a coaching client today, he asked me, "Why don't you make me a full checklist person?" I said, "If you really wanted to be a checklist kind of person, you would be already. I can't make you anything. My job is to help you find your strengths and figure out what works for you!" My goal when working with people is not to ...

In a meeting today, the leader of the meeting (to be clear, not the leader of the group!) asked us a check in question. He asked two, but the first was such a good question because: 1. It had nothing to do with our meeting 2. It helped us get to know each other better 3. It allowed us to dream 4. It had constraints These are not requir...

I’ve been on social media for years. Twitter was one of the best creations ever. What made it so amazing is that it felt, in the early days at least, like you got to talk with a bunch of awesome people that were your friends you just hadn’t met yet. Obviously, Twitter has changed, as it should. And that’s ok. I don’t begrudge it for ad...

I have a new philosophy that I'm trying out: I figure if I can take the time to read it, I could at least take the time to reply. I've done a lot of lurking on social media and blogs in the past. Rather than just checking out what comes across me, if I'm going to take the time to spend my attention on something. I should at least take ...

Despite the title, I'm not an IT department. Several years ago, I learned about thin clients, which basically are computers designed to be low performance and low cost and have a connection back to a server where all the magic happens! Was that oversimplified enough? Over the last three months, I have had some major computer trouble an...

In 2009, I worked as a distance learning and media team lead. I had many responsibilities, but one of them revolved around the distance learning program for our district of 33,000 kids. The process of distance learning was to have a teacher in a high school teach a class, and then broadcast that class simultaneously to three other high...

I was reminded today while reading Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage of the importance of focusing on One Thing. Several years ago, I read the book The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. In fact, I was even on the One Thing Podcast. Patrick Lencioni calls it a thematic goal. He says: ““A thematic goal is … Singular. One thing has...

I learned about Dr. Rob Gilbert's Success Hotline today. Did you know about it? Call this number: 973-743-4690 Today he shares a great story about a woman named Wilma who overcame being confined to a wheelchair to be an olympic athlete. Powerful. But that part isn't even that powerful. What was so amazing is that this was message #10,9...

In a few weeks, the 400th episode of Transformative Principal will be released. With all the bonuses and extra episodes, the episode count is actually around 525! I did a little math today and saw that I’ve actually broken the 200 hour mark with today’s episode. That’s over 8 straight days of audio. As my cousin Joel said, “That’s a lo...

I finish all of my mastermind meetings and trainings with a simple question: “What was most valuable to you today?” The question has two purposes: 1. Help people verbalize why they attended the event. 2. Feedback for me about what resonated with them. I want to help people realize what was good for them from what they attended. If they...

I read this post about homework. Here’s my philosophy as a school principal on homework: It is unethical for schools to tell families what they should do at home, after school is out for the day.* Therefore, homework should not exist. Matt’s post tells you more. Can you imagine how a teacher (or any other employee) would feel if a boss...

Lots of people these days are saying that there is learning loss and that we need to be concerned about it. In fact, Katie Pekel claims just one principal has received 30 emails just about learning loss from people really concerned about it. That principal must have good spam filters in place. These people are actually businesses preyi...

Several years ago, Amy Fast, a principal in McMinnville, Oregon, said something profound to me. I didn’t understand it fully at the time, but I’ve repeated it to hundreds of people at this point. She said, “In fact, I wouldn't even say we need to fill their cups as a means to an end. Like let's not fill their cups so that they can give...