A Vermont superintendent, serving as one of four official conference bloggers, on what she accomplished during her first full day of AASA conference activities.

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So far today, 12,000 steps. That is good, right?

Today was about learning from colleagues. I attended a round table on google tools for ed leadership and learned the most from a colleague from New Jersey. We plan to share templates and ideas after this conference. Following that, I ran into a couple of folks I knew from previous conferences and met someone new from Pennsylvania. While my goal was to learn more about principal supervision, and I did, I think my greatest takeaway of the day is how important it is to talk with each other, to other school leaders who face the same challenges I do, and have different ideas on how best to solve them. It is so easy to get stuck on how I have always done it, or how my state  tends to do things. Today I learned a way to use google spreadsheets to track teacher evaluations that my principals do, and to use it also for data sheets for teachers. I am not doing this justice, simply by stating the learned topic. But the ideas were fresh and the approaches one I had not though of before.

My challenge to you: talk to other school leaders as often as you can while here. Ask how they approach something that is challenging you right now. Look for sessions on it and talk to people there. It will pay off in big dividends.