“Empowered Schools, Empowered Students” by Pernille Ripp

The second I saw the Pernille Ripp had another book coming out, I immediately bought a prepaid copy of “Empowered Schools, Empowered Students: Creating Connected and Invested Learners” on July 30th, 2014. I finally received it in the mail this week, feeling like I waited forever, and dived into the pages right away.

If you don’t know who Pernille is, she is a connected educator, the creator of the Global Read Aloud, (I’m so excited to be participating in for the first time this year), and the writer of “Passionate Learners: Giving our Classrooms Back to Our Students,” THE book that changed my view on teaching. Check out my write up on “Passionate Learners” here.

“Empowered Schools, Empowered Students: Creating Connected and Invested Learners” is a great guide filled with ideas about how to make your school, principal, teachers and students feel more empowered.

There are so many amazing ideas in this book that I can’t share all of them but I’ll share my favourites.

She talks about the principal feeling like a “Lone Ranger” and she suggested to create leadership team to make decisions about school but also include students and parents into the team as well. I’m happy to say that in my school, I’m on our leadership team and although we have just started, I know that having the team will be beneficial to the whole school and community.

Ongoing professional development is essential for teachers to know and be able to implement current teaching techniques into their practice. Staff meetings are usually a time to communicate what is going on in the school. Now, with all of our technology, Pernille suggests to have a staff email update that must be read and use staff meetings as a time to learn, collaborate and innovate. She also talks about ways to create time for teachers to plan and learn together within the school day. Two ideas I really liked were having an all school read in a common space or a dance that the whole school attends. That way the students need limited supervision and the teachers can have meetings to plan together or learn new teacher techniques.

She also discusses that teachers  within the board can be used as experts to save time and money for the board. I wrote about it here in this post.

To purchase Pernille Books, click on the below links:

“Passionate Learners: Giving our Classrooms Back to Our Students”

“Empowered Schools, Empowered Students: Creating Connected and Invested Learners”