On assessment: measure what you value instead of valuing only what you can measure.
What we want for our students we should want for our teachers: learning, challenge, support, and respect.
Change is easy to propose, hard to implement, and especially hard to sustain.
We learn more from people who are different from us than ones who are the same.
High performing organizations have cultures of creativity and risk. They encourage workers to innovate and play.
Improvement is about doing something better; innovation is about doing something new.
The quality & morale of teachers is absolutely central to the well being of students and their learning.
A successful school has to engage all the people, all the powers, and all the capacities within it.
A first class system of early childhood education is the hallmark of a caring and civilized society.
Too many professional development initiatives are done to teachers - not for, with or by them.
We must use collegiality not to level people down but to bring together their strength and creativity.
Lateral trust among colleagues is as important as vertical trust within the hierarchy.
Courageous leadership is not fearless leadership. What makes you a leader is how you deal with your fears.
It's important to be innovative when times are prosperous. It's essential to be innovative when they are not.
Don't raise the bar and narrow the gap, but narrow the gap to raise the bar.
Education leaders must have the will at times to release leadership to the teachers the parents and the students.
Every learner has special needs.
One or two bad teachers is a problem with the teachers. A school with many bad teachers is a problem of leadership.
Blame and betrayal are the emotional enemies of improvement.
Capacity building originally meant helping people to help themselves. Now it means required training to deliver imposed policies.
You cannot switch teachers on and off as if they were PowerPoint presentations.
On school culture: It's hard to eat something you've had a relationship with.
If one foot is in a bucket of steam, and the other is in a bucket of ice, you are not, on average, comfortable.
High performance leaders capitalize on crises to galvanize the motivation and actions of people in the organization.
Without optimism & self-belief among teachers, classrooms become wastelands of boredom & routine and schools deserts of lost opportunity.
