Empowering everyone in your building ensures that each person feels valuedand important.

 

Empower Your Staff

 

Get to know every one of your staff members so that you know their strengths and gifts. Getting to know everyone can be fun and easy.

I have used several different methods to collect information about the people on my staff.

Here are my three favorites.

 

1.  “Stand Out”  by  Marcus Buckingham

 

Marcus has written several books about identifying and understanding one’s strengths. Each book provides a “key” to use to access his on-line  “Strengths Survey“.

This survey is an easy to use assessment tool which provides a personal profile identifying the individual’s five top strengths. Instead of focusing on our weaknesses, Buckingham advocates that we celebrate our strengths and put those to good use in our everyday living and working with others. This easy to use assessment provides lots of valuable information about everyone on your staff. You can easily empower each person by highlighting their strengths and putting those strengths to work within your school. You will quickly learn which person is best to ask to take care of the staff’s “touchie-feelie” needs, which person is the best one to keep track of the time during meetings, or which person to ask to take care of supplying food for meetings.

 

2. Carl Jung’s Personality Profile

 

This personality assessment uses Carl Jung’s theory that there are sixteen main personality types. According to Jung, we all fall into one of these sixteen personality types depending on our preferences in the following categories:

(1) Sensing-Intuition, (2) Extrovert-Introvert, (3) Thinking-Feeling, (4) Judging-Perceiving

To determine your personality profile, you participate in an on-line questionnaire. You answer each question by selecting your preference from the choices you are given. It is a fast and easy process.

To have your whole staff complete the questionnaire, you can take everyone into your computer lab and have each person complete their on-line assessment at the same time. It will take about 15-20 minutes. After they complete their assessment, have them print their “findings” and then cluster together with others with similar results.

You will want people to record their results so you can gather and share that information as a talking piece at a later time. There are no Right or Wrongpersonalities. We just are who we are!

What is helpful for you as the administrator, is that you will quickly find out which staff members are detail oriented or time conscious or more laid back. You will want to make note of that when deciding how to form teams or when wanting to find someone to plan the track and field events, etc.

Information about the Carl Jung Personality Test (also known as the Meyers Briggs assessment) is readily available on line

Carl Jung Personality Assessment

 

3. True Colors Personality Assessment.

 

This assessment groups people into four color groups, Orange, Green, Goldand Blue based on each person’s responses to a series of questions asking about their personal preferences in certain situations.

You can bring in a trained presenter for this assessment. If you do that, you and your people will have a half day of fun as you learn about yourself and everyone on your staff.

Everyone will be engaged in creative, low risk, activities while learning their own and their colleagues’ personalty color.

You can find out lots more about True Colors on line.

So now what…

Well, if you do any of the above information-gathering activities, you will have provided your people with some valuable information about themselves that will be useful to each staff member and to you as their administrator.

Once you have gathered all the information, chart and post it. Make this a “Who Are We” and a “Who Ya Gonna Call” type of process. Make it FUN!

 

 

With the information you gather, you can form work groups based on who works well together and based on how people work through challenges.

 

Empower Your Students

 

Helping your students understand that they have their own power is an enlightening experience for children. Often times children feel powerless at home, in the classroom, and on the playground. Teaching them what their personal power is and how to use it wisely gives them control over their daily encounters with others.

 

Sometimes the best way to teach children about their personal power is to help them understand what happens when they give it away. For example, if a student chooses to disobey the school’s rules, they face the school’s consequences. They have given away their power and handed it over to the person assigning the consequences.

Helping the students understand that functioning within the school’s guidelines is their choice, but when they decide to disobey the rules, they have given away their power and possibly their recess or free time. Giving away or keeping their own power is their own choice.

Giving students jobs, either in the classroom or throughout the school, helps instill a sense of pride in the themselves and in their school. There are countless jobs you can find that students will eagerly volunteer to do. Some examples can be found here.Student Jobs

 

Empower Parents

 

The more you invite parents into your school to help with activities, to help plan events, to help decide on matters important to school life, the more you empower them. They will feel they are valued! They will be your biggest ambassadors if they truly feel they play a part in the life of the school.

 

 

Empower Your School Community

 

Invite community members into your school for assemblies or fun events. Ask them to speak at assemblies, if they are interested in sharing something about their business or how they see the school plays a role in their business.

 

 

Bring some students with you on a mini field trip to introduce your school to any businesses close to your school. Ask local businesses if they are willing to display some of the students’ art work.

Once the businesses feel that you recognize them in the community, they will gladly acknowledge the school as an important partner in the neighborhood.

 

Teacher Performance Appraisals

 

The best way possible to empower your teachers is to acknowledge their teaching skills. Watch your teachers teach and give them encouraging, positive and constructive feedback.

 

Your school district will have policies and procedures to follow for conducting your teacher performance appraisals. Make sure you are familiar with those and them make them your own.

You will need to be prepared for three types of teaching.

1. Superior teaching
2. Average teaching
3. In-need-of-help teaching

You will need to provide feedback for all three types of teaching. In order to do that, you must have a clear picture in your mind of what you want to focus on with each teacher to help him or her reach their greatest potential.

To save time and ensure you are on the right track, either read through existing teacher appraisals for people in your school or ask a colleague to share one or two reports they have written.

Once you understand your school district’s format, create a template and begin filling in as much information as you can for each teacher requiring a performance appraisal. Save each one separately in their own folder. Add to those folders as the year progresses after each of your observations.

Keeping all your observations in one location will make writing the final report much easier.

There are countless ideas on the internet to help you with report writing and data gathering.

 

Email Me to “chat” . I will get back to you PRONTO!