And the Votes Are In...

One never knows what the day may bring. Today's mail contained an evaluation of the session I presented at the National Middle School Association Conference in Denver around six weeks ago. The numbers were good. I was especially pleased with the response to the question, "I would rate this presenter as excellent." On a scale of 1-5 (with fours being "Agree" and 5 being "Strongly Agree"), the score on that question was 4.81.

Here are the comments:

• Great strategies and tools to move to a higher level of organization.

• One of my professional goals is to be more organized and to manage time more effectively. This hit the target.

• Good tools! I will implement it ASAP!

• If would have been great if Dr. Buck would have been able to present only to teachers and students at another session. He is very resourceful. Great motivation @ the end of the presentation!

• Really enjoyed session as well as the system. The trick will be to follow it until it becomes habit.

• Excellent, helpful, useful, and practical information.
  

• Thank you. These are tools I can and will use! WHEW!
  

• Excellent presentation, shared some strategies that I will try to implement to help me be more organized. Frank was impressive and his help/expertise would benefit our entire staff. I will explore the possibility of securing his services for an inservice presentation at our school.
  

• Practical.
  

• Excellent session. I am already ready to get organized better as a principal.
  

• Fantastic! Great info—can’t wait to try tickler.
  

• Really enjoyed the learning experience.

• Thank you—I needed this!
  

• I think the presenter did a marvelous job. I plan to go back and implement the things he shared. Thanks!
  

• Excellent presentation. Could be longer.
  

• Good tips given.
  

• One of the most informative sessions I have been to in 5 years.
  

• Excellent!
  

• FANTASTIC! One of the best I’ve been to! I could have stayed longer.

• Excellent practical tools.

The presentation said nothing about reaching the adolescent learner, how to improve test scores, or how to build positive public relations. Some other presenters covered those bases well. Every one of those good ideas, if implemented, would happen through the dimension of time. Good ideas not implemented would likely be blamed on lack of time. When the conference was over and everyone stepped back into the day-to-day activities and confronted the e-mails, phone messages, and left-over tasks, an organized approach to managing our time becomes our only hope of rising above the mundane and touching excellence.

Davonia and I had a great time in Denver. I felt like we gave people something they could use in every area of their lives. After reading the evaluations, these feelings were confirmed. If you are reading this blog as a result of attending the session in Denver, thank you! Thank you for taking the time to attend the session and for taking the time to stop by here and dig a little deeper.

NMSA 2009 will be in Indianapolis and the application is in the tickler file to complete this Saturday. Hope to see you there!

Still More Scenes from Denver

More Scenes from Denver

A few more pictures from Denver. More to come...

Scenes from Denver

A few pictures from our trip to the National Middle School Association Convention in Denver. More pictures to come.

National Middle School Association (Denver)

Thanks to the audience of well over 100 who came to the session and to those who came up to me at some point during the conference to let me know how they intend to implement what they heard. During the one hour and fifteen minutes, we were able to give at least an introduction to the following ideas:

• Mastering paperwork with tickler files
• Organizing it all with your "signature tool"
• Handling repeating tasks
• Documenting made easy enough you will actually do it
• Getting e-mail from "in" to "empty"

I am beginning to hear the same comments with regularity:

• This makes so much sense.
• I had no idea it was so easy.
• Why hasn't anybody told me this before?
• I needed this!

Special thanks to Kerry Palmer for being my facilitator for the session. Kerry is principal at Trinity Middle School in Montgomery, Alabama and doing an outstanding job as a first-year principal. His blogs serve as just one example of the professional, positive approach he takes. You can view his faculty blog by clicking here or his parent blog by clicking here.

If you are visiting this blog for the first time as a result of coming to the session in Denver, thanks for stopping by. You are the reason I created this blog in the first place! We can cover just so much in 75 minutes. Web 2.0 allows us to continue the discussion.

This next weekend, I will be sending out the next e-mail newsletter, so by November 10, you should receive it. Be sure to check your spam folder and in case it gets caught there.

More pictures from Denver will be forthcoming!

Good to Great...It Takes Time

Jim Collins was amazing in his address at yesterday's general session for the National Middle School Association Convention. Author of the best seller Good to Great, Collins tailored his remarks to hit home with the gathering of middle-level educators. Several of the significant points are as follows:

The adage "schools should be run like a business" is poor advice for schools. While there are businesses which are "great," most businesses are, well...average. Why in the world would we want to take practices which are merely average and import them into our schools.

We need to look for those things which work and stick with them. Our tendency in education is to start new things, abandon them quickly, and start something else. As Collins put it, "The signature of mediocrity is in inconsistency." Furthermore, he implored leaders to empower others to have freedom to "polish a lead bullet into silver and have time to do it."

Of particular interest to me was when Jim Collins touched on time management and implored us to develop not only a "to do" list but a "stop doing" list. More on this subject later.

NMSA Conference

If you are coming to Denver for the National Middle School Association Conference, I invite you to attend the session I am presenting. For the schedule for my presentation, and that of others published by Eye on Education, click here.