Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership, School Finance

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership - Student Activities and Activity Accounts

Attention: Howard Rheingold

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Attention Training

Can you train someone to pay attention? If so, at what age do we stop being able to be trained?

We often boast about our ability to multi-task thus paying attention to a multitude of influences and stimulus.

But cognitive brain research shows that multitasking can in fact be a waste of time.

Is multitasking effective or just an illusion? Who is to decide? Multitasking is something I feel I do very well but at what expense. I find myself being distracted and wanting to pay attention to multiple activities at a time. I know when I choose to focus on the task at hand, I do much better. In one of my recent grad school classes, we discussed "Flow" in reference to our creative ability.

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields

I know when I get in the state of flow, I almost become trance like and focused like a laser, not to mention this is the time when I am at my best. Why then do I allow or continue to multitask?

Do I have ADD? Makes me wonder sometimes. Or am I afraid I am going to miss something. If I am honest with myself, I believe it is a little of both.

Today I ran across an article at Boston.com that tickled my personal and professional thoughts. Can we train someone to pay attention? If so, why don't I train myself and more importantly why aren't we teaching this in schools? As a professional educator, I notice my students have great difficulty getting on task and staying on task for extended periods of time. Would attention training help improve my students in my class?

The ability to pay careful attention isn't important just for students and air traffic controllers. Researchers are finding that attention is crucial to a host of other, sometimes surprising, life skills: the ability to sort through conflicting evidence, to connect more deeply with other people, and even to develop a conscience. Boston.com

This evidence and new research is exciting to me as a teacher, parent and learner. Bring it on!

This research is in the infancy stage but it has promising discoveries. I believe it is so exciting to know that we have some proof that we can work on this aspect.

My big question for myself is, Does my multitasking help me or distract me? With all the new tools such as the Twitter, UStream, Plurk, etc. will my multitasking get more efficient or much more distracted? I am enjoying the social staff development from reading so many different blogs, twitter posts and social conversations. Interesting ideas such as Dr. Scott McCleod's 140 word book review, Google's advice for student to major in learning or David Jakes 15 minute Staff Development. would never made it across my learning space if not for this social network.

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership, Data analysis of a campus

Today, we looked at AEIS reports for your schools. The groups were divided by the type of school: elementary, middle and high school.

We used our personal laptops to access the reports online. In each group we were to analyze the data and answer questions Dr. Boone had given us. We searched the web for additional information data for your group. We looked at Houston High School in San Antonio.

Each group gave a small presentation about our analysis and findings.

The data was very rich but also provided lots of questions we could not answer by just looking at this one data instrument.

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership - School Improvement

Campus Leadership

Models of change discussed in class - Lionberger's Stage of Change, Fullan's Three I Model, Concerns-Based Adoption Model, Lewin's Force-Field Analysis.

Dr. Boone, Campus Leadership

Campus Leadership Analysis

Assignment: Interview your practicing campus principal. Topics to be included include: supervisory activities, including providing feedback to staff, working with and nurturing assistant principals and teachers, making changes happen in school, his or her decision making practices, the campus improvement process.

Prepare a 3-page summary and conclusions about what you learned in the interview.

Key points from the interview for me:

Administrative duties are tough in large schools.

Feedback and supervision tends to be impersonal in large schools due to size.

Family time will be impacted.

Separation from students is hard to deal with but inevitable.

Change is a process.

Decision making ability is key.

Be more of an influencer but be prepared to make the decision if needed.

The notes in the live blog reflect comments from the class.

Day Four - Dr. Boone

Dr. Boone, Day four, Campus Leadership in Texas: The Effective Principal and New Voices in the Field. Topics of the day were the relationship of culture and climate, Maria's Story from New Voices and Campus Leadership in Texas.


The relationship between culture and climate. Culture is the foundation climate. You can change and impact the culture by changing the climate since culture is based on beliefs and are hard to get at. The climate can be changed in a variety of ways.


Maria's story was in the first chapter in Voices in the Field. Maria described her first year as an Assistant Principal. She described the many activities she experienced that she was not prepared for. Time seemed to disappear and was not manageable. Maria was also surprised at the many different situations she was not prepared to handle, either due to lack of experience, identity with the problem or lack of training.

Campus Leadership is Texas
We read and discussed the first Chapter in the book. Key ideas were the First 100 Days and three key questions to ask. The three key questions were:
What are the strengths of this school and community?
What are the opportunities for improvement? If you could change one thing immediately, what would it be?

Cultivating Leadership, Chapters 2 and 4

Day Three - Chapters 2 and 4

Public School Leadership Reconsidered and The Planetary Culture of Schools

Day two of Summer II at Texas State University with Dr. Boone.

EDA 5347 Educational Environments

Dr. Clarence Lorrotta,

Dr. Boone, EDA 6344, Texas State, Campus Leadership

This is my first Live Blog. I am taking notes from my Graduate Classes at Texas State university. Feel free to comment about the notes and ideas from class.