The Dock School Leader Podcast

What They Won’t Forget

3 minutes of your time will help us improve this podcast https://forms.office.com/r/1G564EGQkn
Take the survey!
You’ve heard it before; your school will develop a culture, a spirit. The question is: what kind of a spirit will it be and what can you do to form it?
Richie Lauer brings helpful insight and proactive ideas for you to consider as you get into your school year. Richie has taught and administrated and now fills a role at Anabaptist Financial. This talk comes from way back in 2001. Richie highlights the need to cultivate and guard respect, looks at ways to maximize participation, unpacks the significance of the various interactions around school, and offers examples of the kinds of traditions that bear a lot of weight in developing healthy school spirit.
Many of the details and too much of the information learned at school is forgotten. School plays a unique role in forming a child’s identity and that is something they never lose.
You can find the entire session from which this talk was excerpted at the link below. Jonas Sauder gives his thoughts and ideas in the second half of the session.
 Links
This recording was first published on The Dock as “Developing School Spirit and Traditions:” https://thedockforlearning.org/lecture/developing-school-spirit-and-traditions/
7: Curriculum is Important, but What About Everything Else? https://administratorspodcast.podbean.com/e/curriculum-is-important-but-what-about-everything-else/

What’s Happening at Home?

As a school administrator, what is your role in speaking into your students’ homes? That’s actually a much bigger question than what this talk addresses.
Homes matter so much.
Perhaps we’re tempted to think we can take any student and transform them through a great school experience, but that only reaches so far. As we consider our influence at school and capacity to establish a particular culture, it’s important for us to come to grips with the influence of the home. This ought to inspire our gratitude for the good homes and parents from which we benefit as well as prompt us to prayerfully search for ways to care for the troubled homes with which we interact. Ultimately, we offer our work at school to our heavenly Father and trust Him to work through the Spirit to form and establish our students according to his good will.
Gerald Miller cares an awful lot about this issue as you are about to hear in this vigorous appeal to take the home’s influence seriously. He has taught and administrated for many years at Faith Builders Christian School in northwestern Pennsylvania. He is addressing parents and school leaders here as a parent and a school leader. This is an opportunity to consider important strengths and weaknesses in your own example if you are a parent and an opportunity for anyone to gain insight into the circumstances of the families that you serve.
We offer this episode in the hope that God will graciously guide you in responding to any needs that this talk brings to your attention.
Links
This recording was first published on The Dock as “Evaluating Seven Elements of Your Home’s Influence:” https://thedockforlearning.org/lecture/evaluating-seven-elements-of-your-homes-influence/
More presentations from CASBI 2018: https://thedockforlearning.org/series/casbi/casbi-2018/
Artificial Maturity, Tim Elmore (book): https://a.co/d/97CIjO4

Governing the Classroom Gracefully

“A teacher can never put in a method what he does not have in himself.” -Emerson White
This is part 2 of this pair of talks from Jonas Sauder on orienting teachers to their work. Jonas speaks from a deep and passionate vision for education that has sustained and guided him over the past decades. It’s inspiring to hear him cast vision for teaching from a place of fullness and freshness.
In the first episode, Jonas laid out some basic concepts for teachers in forming healthy expectations for their work and their place in the community. In this episode, he delves into the need for and fundamentals of classroom management. Jonas is keen to emphasize that you don’t manage a classroom primarily by how you plan but through who you are. Especially for new teachers, that may feel daunting. Maybe even like a bit of a dead end. I hope you’ll find some language for how to communicate about both the more concrete and abstract components of effective classroom management.
Infused in this talk is a core understanding of children as persons, not pawns. Classroom management is about creating an orderly, nourishing environment for little humans not designing and maintaining some kind of machine.
Jonas closes with a few cautionary ideas on how to lose control of your classroom.
As you press into this new school year, may God give you grace to lead your team with clarity and joy.
 
 
Links
This recording was first published on The Dock as "Teacher Orientation: Managing the Classroom:" https://thedockforlearning.org/lecture/teacher-orientation-managing-the-classroom-jonas-sauder/ 
More recordings from Teacher’s Week 2008: https://thedockforlearning.org/series/teachers-week-2008/ 
The First Days of School (book): https://christianlearning.org/product/first-days-school/ 

Launching Your New Teachers

Preparation is vital to building solid momentum. Our next segment of four episodes will explore two areas that will play a huge role in the building or defeating momentum at your school this year. These two areas are orienting your teaching team and investing in healthy school culture. What do your teachers need to understand and prepare in order to succeed? In both August episodes, Jonas Sauder will address this question. In September, Gerald Miller and Richie Lauer will help us orient and deepen our leadership of our school culture.
Description
Many of you school leaders are in the process or will soon be onboarding new teachers. All of you are about to guide your team through a new school year. Perhaps your staff have experience, maybe you have someone starting their first year of teaching. How do you see your teachers, especially your new ones? What expectations do you have for them? How do you go beyond just helping them to feel good for the first weeks and set them up for a successful year?
 
Jonas Sauder has labored for decades in many levels of Christian education. Listen in as he addresses a group of new teachers and glean from his perspective as you lead your team through the opening days of this upcoming school term.
 
Links
This recording was first published on The Dock as "Teacher Orientation: Expectations & Preparation:" https://thedockforlearning.org/lecture/teacher-orientation-expectations-preparation-jonas-sauder/ 
This recording is from Teacher’s Week 2008: https://thedockforlearning.org/series/teachers-week-2008/

What Keeps You Going?

What sources of motivation power the performance of your roles? Not only is perseverance a challenge, but it has so many imposters.
There are so many broken versions of true motivation that offer us a way forward just when we’re in a pinch or when we’re sitting in silence waiting impatiently for some fresh inspiration. It seems that it takes some suffering to strip away our ambition and expose our egotistic motivation. And it’s deeply unsettling to be left with what feels like nothing.
Perhaps you’ve been through this or are going through this even now. We require many rounds of training here. This talk explores three elements of the courage to endure.
The example of the faithful
The life and victory of Jesus
The hope of the resurrection
John Coblentz offers these three sources of motivation that draw us towards what’s real, true, and beautiful. John has taught, led, pastored, and counseled in a variety of places. He now serves at Faith Builders and is part of the leadership of a church in Meadville Pennsylvania.
 
Links
This recording is from Teacher’s Week 2024. Other recordings: https://thedockforlearning.org/series/fbep-teachers-week/teachers-week-2024/
Teachers Week 2025: https://thedockforlearning.org/event/faith-builders-teachers-week-2025/

Your Destination or Your Way–Your Choice

What’s the link between our destination and our way? This is one of those things that is not difficult to comprehend but by all appearances, famously difficult to obey.
The way is often not apparent or is offensive to us. Or it may be that the way we have chosen is so precious to us that we have lost both the clarity and the concern about our destination. In any evet, it is improbable that we will choose the way of Jesus even if we affirm the goodness of his destination.
This is the situation that Mahlon Zehr addresses, exploring how these four virtues enable us to follow the way of Jesus.
Humility
Faith
Hope
Love
Mahlon speaks as a farmer, educator, and writer from northern Oregon.
 
“A foolish man chooses his way and must accept his destiny, but a wise man chooses his destiny and accepts the way.” -Anon.
This recording was first published on The Dock as “Of Destinies and Ways:” https://thedockforlearning.org/lecture/of-destinies-and-ways/
More Recordings from Pacific School Leadership Institute 2021: https://thedockforlearning.org/series/psli/pacific-school-leadership-institute-2021/

The 5 Big Questions

Why do we exist?
For what results are we accountable?
Who are we serving–primarily?
What are our values?
What is our plan?
These are five questions that according to Steven Brubaker are essential for every school leader to help his school to answer clearly and to communicate relentlessly to everyone involved with the school.
When God has work he wants done, he looks for a person fit for the job. Obviously, there are many different positions that God fills when he forms a community of faith. School administrators and leaders are among them. Drawing from Ezekiel 22 and from his observations over 30 years in the conservative Christian school movement, Steven Brubaker identifies school leadership as one of the wider gaps in our communities and one that we’ve had trouble filling. Steven reflects on his experience as a teacher and administrator from the day he accepted his first job at a school at age 22. There he was tasked with both teaching and administrating. That first year he learned that he liked teaching. In the decades since he has developed a passion for administration as well. Clear and thoroughly communicated answers to these questions will go a long way to turning this gap into a strong part of the wall.
Like other speakers on this show, Steven warns us about the shallowness of a negative answer to the question of why we exist born out of our departure from the public schools. And if we do some hard work on that first question of existence, we are primed to form clear and powerful answers to the rest. God has sustained our schools with his grace. The questions that Steven unpacks here lay out a way for us to steward the tremendous resources that God has entrusted to us.
 
Links
[book] The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization – Peter Drucker: https://a.co/d/f4pNlWc
[book] Good to Great – Jim Collins: https://a.co/d/eUuL3la
[this show] Episode 14: Why Administrators? – Steven Brubaker: https://administratorspodcast.podbean.com/e/why-administrators/
This recording was first published on The Dock as “Loving our Work:” https://thedockforlearning.org/lecture/loving-our-work/
More Recordings from Administrator’s Conference and Retreat: https://thedockforlearning.org/series/administrators-conference-and-retreat/
Details about Administrators Conference: https://www.fbep.org/attend/events/administrators-conference-and-retreat/

Sustaining a Passion for Christian Education

What makes education distinctly Christian? Is this more a question of what it is or what it isn’t? But whatever we make of those questions, how do educators remain passionate about their mundane, sometimes thankless, often discouraging role in carrying this work forward? Anthony Hurst, who has over 25 years of experience in Christian Day Schools and currently works as school representative for Christian Light, offers valuable insight on these perennial questions.
School leaders, you’ve likely experienced just how quickly your own vision and motivation can fade. You are also in a prime position to renew the passion of the teams that you lead. Join Anthony in reflecting on what keeps the fire burning. As you listen to his ideas and insights, take note of memories and experiences this brings to mind.
How could you and your team tap into the experiences of the past year to renew your commitment for the next one?
 
Links
This recording was first published on The Dock as Why I am Passionate About Christian Education: https://thedockforlearning.org/lecture/why-i-am-passionate-about-christian-education/ 
More Recordings from Pacific School Leadership Institute 2021: https://thedockforlearning.org/series/psli/pacific-school-leadership-institute-2021/
More Information about Pacific School Leaders Institute: https://psli.info/

Child Development Orientation

How do children develop? How do we give them the best chance of healthy development? The fact of the ocean of ink spilled on this question has not lessened the actual wonder of this process or the reality of its mystery.
 
In a presentation filled with stories and examples, Brandon Mullet explores the basic needs of children. Brandon speaks as an administrator, teacher, and parent.
 
He discusses themes such as:
Laboring for what is right and fulfilling for children without regard for own reputation and recognition
Ministering sacrificially to children
Walking with Christ so we can minister in his love
Letting children know that we love them and enjoy them and like being with them
 
This presentation was given over 25 years ago which highlights the reality that these issues are timeless. May you find them illuminating and orienting as you head into the summer and engage with the children in your life as well as reflecting on this past school year.
Links
Child Development Workshop 1998: https://thedockforlearning.org/series/child-development-workshop/ 
Opening comic: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1962/02/04
This was first published on The Dock as "Child Development: Biblical Orientation:" https://thedockforlearning.org/lecture/child-development-biblical-orientation/ 

A Teacher’s Root System

How are your teachers’ root systems? If you have the opportunity, ask an arborist talk about root systems and about the tree planting and care process. From root hairs to mycorrhizae, it’s a fascinating world. But one that is mostly invisible to us and that tends to fall prey to our drive to control and manipulate what is visible to us. Melvin Lehman employs the metaphor of roots as he reflects on nearly four decades of teaching.
 
He did his first teaching back in the early days of the Christian school movement when he observed much rapid planting driven by the need to quickly fill the empty spaces in all the new classrooms. We have better opportunities for cultivating strong and healthy roots today. But of course, this is not automatic and there are plenty of pressing reasons for ignoring our root systems. As a school leader, you are in a position to model the development of healthy roots and to care for those of your team. Without them, as Melvin says, we will be unable to access and appropriate the resources around them, however rich and abundant they may be.
 
Here are some of the main recommendations that Melvin makes in his talk:
Develop of the discipline of meditation and prayer
Be wholesome (and holy)
Accept new or challenging assignments
Read widely and with a plan
Teach in diverse situations
Pursue stimulating and productive hobbies
Master new and essential skills
Surround yourself with stimulating and challenging people
Take advanced courses of study
This episode was first published on The Dock as "Intentional Growth:" https://thedockforlearning.org/lecture/intentional-growth-melvin-lehman/ More from Teachers Week 2012: https://thedockforlearning.org/series/fbep-teachers-week/teachers-week-2012/