Ryan Kachold, EdD Money matters for student outcomes. I help K-12 education leaders understand how. ​​​​

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Good morning everyone!

I hope we are all enjoying our Sunday morning. The year is back in full swing. I had an athletic coach resign on Friday. It's the fourth head coach this program has had in four years. Parents are understandably frustrated. I have nine parent meetings on Monday to listen and try to partner with my community to move forward for our athletes. I wish I could say I was looking forward to it.

​Here is my Instagram reel from Friday that summed up my day. It was a rough one, and Monday is shaping up to be similar. If you watch my reel, you'll learn that my favorite way to unwind from a tough day is my Rubik's cube!

However, what helps me truly process my tough days as a high school principal is writing to you all as often as I can.

The concept of leading and lagging indicators:

I first came across these two concepts when I took my school down the road of becoming a High Reliability School through Marzano Resources. This really is a beautiful, fundamentally sound framework with which to view how well you allocate time, people, and money in your school. Here is an example from a real school doing this at a high level.

Leading indicator: Predominant instructional practices throughout the school are known and monitored. See more examples of leading indicators here

The leading indicator here is about the monitoring of instructional practices in the school. In order to improve instruction, we first have to know what our practices predominantly are. This is a universally recognized, healthy condition for any school to have. The lagging indicator image here is a graph of observations performed by the school's Guiding Coalition, a team of teacher leaders who meet regularly to improve instruction and collective efficacy in the school. The lagging indicator describes the health or presence of the leading indicator.

I wanted to share this one because if you're having trouble conceptualizing or understanding how to take steps to improve your school, this can help with strategic decision making and actually taking concrete steps to implement procedures in your school or district.

A recipe for building collaboration in your school:

I had another Instagram reel reach 22,000+ views, and I actually thought it would flop. It was about four ideas or processes that, if in place, allow any school leader to say their school is great. Here is the reel, and here are the processes:

• Teachers build the vision for great instruction themselves.
• Teachers watch each other teach on a regular basis.
• A team of teachers, not administrators, leads instructional improvement.
• New and veteran teachers coach each other through real cycles of continuous improvement.

If you take these four ideas and apply the leading and lagging indicator framework to them, how would you implement processes to articulate the health of these ideas in your school? Just a reflective question for you to consider.

I wanted to share this in case it resonated with any of you, given its engagement on the socials. If you'd like to reach out and learn how I implement these, I'd be happy to coach you through it.

People commented on this real, saying they have none of them in place. Others say it's not possible. I've seen all four of these in place in two schools I personally worked at.

Thanks for reading this edition!

As always, I am so grateful for your engagement and readership. Check out my socials and engage there daily. Your feedback is always appreciated. Some of you who have been readers a long time may notice that there has been an advertisement block added. I am grateful to be receiving sponsorship opportunities and will continue to embed them.

Writing and maintaining this newsletter takes quite a bit of time. Time, as you all know, is not free. I love it, but a financial return is critical to keep the work ongoing.

Until next time, thank you.

Ryan