Education matters

In my work I have been lucky to meet many people in and around the field of education. People with deep knowledge of effective pedagogy for both classroom practice and school and system leadership. I am thankful of the opportunities I have had to engage these people in the dialogue of improving our chosen profession and committing to the helping our educators grow and gain respect for the quality work being done around our country.

 I spoke with a colleague, Dan Yahata, who brought up the Hawaiian word Kina’ole - which means “doing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, in the right place, to the right person, for the right reason, with the right feeling…the first time.” It struck him, as we were at the School Improvement Innovation Summit in Salt Lake City, that much of what we were lisdtening to from leading education experts across the United States resonated with this thought in mind.  

Kina'ole is what we need to be modeling. We need to model this with our students if we are teachers. We need to model this with our staff if we are principals. We need to model this with our site administrators if we are district level leaders and all the way up. It is imperative we act with their best interest in the forefront of our mind. All that being said, we must embrace the challenge that lay in front of us in education. The world has evolved into a rapidly paced, ever evolving living creature and education, in general, continues to remain the slowest to respond. We cannot afford, for the sake of our students, to do that anymore. We must, as an educator friend of mine once said, "jump into the deep end of the pool" or else we will fail these students who are all counting on us!